“Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable. ”

“Meg, don't you think you'd make a better adjustment to life if you faced facts?"
I do face facts," Meg said.
They're lots easier to face than people, I can tell you.”

“Why do grown-ups think it's easier for children to bear secrets than the truth? Don't they know about the horror stories we imagine to explain the secrets?”

“I want to grow old without facelifts… I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I've made. Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you'd never complete your life, would you? You'd never wholly know you.”

“You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.”

“What is needed is courage: it is always so much easier to accept what you are being told than to think for yourself.”

“Was insanity really easier to accept than unconsciousness?”

“The worst of his life is not that he thinks that it is living, but that he is satisfied with it, and the most awful thing of life is that he thinks that is how it should be. He can't understand anyone who thinks differently from him, and when he can't understand anything he says: I'm sorry, but I'm only a humble joiner. It's all he can do to accept that fact that I am studying the history of literature and Scandinavian languages: he accepts it not because I will thereby become mentally enriched, but because he thinks that it will enable me to live an easier life that he. Easier but not different.”

“The people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they're easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You'd think they'd be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all.”

“Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.”