'I like heroin, cocaine, nice houses, good furniture, and pretty girls,' said Alexander, 'and I've had all of them in large quantities. But you know, they never made me happy.'
'My word, you're hard to please, aren't you?'

Neither revenge nor forgiveness change what happened.

He had one of those faces that ages prematurely but then goes on looking the same forever. He might even look young in another twenty years.

When you're young it makes a difference to meet people who are kind, however rarely [...] Incidents of kindness get thrown into sharp relief.

Most people either feel regret at staying with someone for too long, or regret at losing them too easily. I manage to feel both ways at the same time about the same object.

The scale was wrong, like places remembered from childhood and dwarfed by the passage of time.

Switchblades of memory that had flashed open all his life reappeared and silenced him.

It was a terrible shock to me when I realized I was getting too old to die young anymore.

To forgive someone, one would have to be convinced that they'd made some effort to change the disastrous course that genetics, class or upbringing proposed for them.

He knew that however much trouble he put into repairing himself, like a once-broken vace that looks whole on its patterned surface but reveals in its pale interior the thin dark lines of its restoration, he could only produce an illusion of wholeness.