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Metaphor is reality once removed.

We have a saying where I come from: Power requires neither permission nor forgiveness.

“Not safe?” I asked, all innocence. “Surely it isn’t illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs.”

A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of depression, but a Beethoven symphony reveals what that depression feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of mind, yet they are rarely brought together.

People often think they would have made the noblest choice, but when they find themselves actually in such a situation, they discover matters aren’t quite so simple.

If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference. But absent near-omniscience there’s no way to know when that is. You can only make your best approximate calculation. You can only make your throw and try to puzzle out the results afterward.

Spread along the platform was a mass of bobbing black hair like a long wave of silk. Suddenly I felt the first stirrings of what I would later come to recognize as kinship, a feeling that alarmed me, a sense that I was of a piece with a group of people for the most basic reasons, simple to the senses and irrational. They all looked like me.

Life can only be understood backward; the trouble is, it has to be lived forward.

"We shore up our prejudices with selected facts..."

Hutte, for instance , used to quote the case of a fellow he called "the beach man ". This man had spent forty years of his life on beaches or by the sides of swimming pools, chatting pleasantly with summer visitors and rich idlers. He is to be seen, in his bathing costume, in the corners and backgrounds of holiday snaps, among groups of happy people, but no one knew his name and why he was there. And no one noticed when one day he vanished from the photographs. I did not dare tell Hutte, but I felt that " the beach man " was myself . Though it would not surprised him if I had confessed it. Hutte was always saying that, in the end, we we're all " beach men " and that the sand keeps the traces of our footsteps only a few moments "

“The difference between you and Robert,” said my sister-in-law, who often (bless her!) speaks on a platform, and oftener still as if she were on one, “is that he recognizes the duties of his position, and you see the opportunities of yours.”

“To a man of spirit, my dear Rose,” I answered, “opportunities are duties.”

'An exile is a refugee with a library!'