No child should ever be too sad to play.

The amusements of life, he argued, should be accepted with the same philosophy as its ills. ("The Striding Place")

Your words, thoughts, intentions and actions today are your best hope, comfort, building blocks and insurance for tomorrow. But it is now alone that is guaranteed _ tomorrow is a dream, a maybe a potential gift. It__ now - not tomorrow - where happiness and fulfilment live...awaiting your discovery. It__ all this that will make each extra day that may arrive extra special and rich.

There were happy days, with watermelon, and sad days of whiskey.

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.

And he knew he would not be travelling home. If he had to wear a donkey jacket and wait for fifty years, then he would wait. At last there was a place in the world where he had reason to be, a place that had meaning. For days, without realising it, he had sensed this meaning everywhere, in the streets, houses, ruins and temples of Rome. It could not be said of the feeling that it was 'filled with pleasurable expectation'. Rome and its millennia were not by nature associated with happiness, and what Mihály anticipated from the future was not what is usually conjured up by 'pleasurable expectation'. He was awaiting his fate, the logical, appropriately Roman, ending.