Albert Camus, from Leonard Cohen's reading list, makes an appearance here, from Notebooks, 1935–1951: What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far...

When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist.

Wrong turns teach us the right way.

Spring adds, summer multiplies, autumn subtracts, winter divides.

We create models to explain nature, but the models wind up gatecrashing nature and driving away the original inhabitants.

Eavesdropping's sort of thrilling 'cause you learn what people really think, but eavesdropping makes you miserable for exactly the same reason.

The song instantly insisted it'd never existed.

Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you look at green, where've the yellow and the blue gone? Somehow this is to do with Moran's dad. Somehow this is to do with everyone and...

Sunlight bent around the world, lending fragile color to wildflowers.

Self pity, Orito reminds herself yet again, is a noose dangling from a rafter.

I consider how you don't get to choose whom you're attracted to, you only get to wonder about it retrospectively.

The mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms.

We are both busy people, so let's cut the small talk.

Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.

The weak are meat the strong do eat.

Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears.

We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely.

Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths.

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.

Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?