It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.

That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.

In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.

There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.

Don't blame me. That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.

You make do with what you have. As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have. That’s one of the few good points of growing older.

The real world—where I probably could never be happy, and never get anywhere.