“When I was a beggarly boy,
And lived in a cellar damp,
I had not a friend nor a toy,
But I had Aladdin's lamp.”

“I’ve abandoned the beggarly need to live. I live without it.”

“When I didn't have friends, I had books.”

“Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.”

“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?”

“O dream on your black wings
you come when I am sleeping.


Sweet is the god but still I am
in agony and far from my strength.


for I had hope (none now) to share
something of the blessed gods,


nor was I so foolish
as to scorn pleasant toys.


Now may I have
all these things.”

“I … allowed my memory to journey back to the days when I was a boy of ten, full of health and optimism, when my wonder at the great game of living had yet to give way to disillusionment at its shabbiness.”

“That is just the way with Memory; nothing that she brings to us is complete. She is a willful child; all her toys are broken. I remember tumbling into a huge dust-hole when a very small boy, but I have not the faintest recollection of ever getting out again; and if memory were all we had to trust to, I should be compelled to believe I was there still.”

“I had my group of friends, you know, like my real group of friends, and then I had, like, party friends.”

“I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.”