Death, of course, is a refuge. It's where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It's where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.

Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.

On our honeymoon we talked and talked. We stayed in a beachfront villa, and we drank rum and lemonade and talked so much that I never even noticed what color the sea was. Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved Andrew, I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven tenths of the earth's surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it.

Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.

Everyone carries the weight of WWII with them in their recent family history, and yet it is rarely spoken about within families, because veterans and survivors don't tend to talk.

I write in the novel's afterword that our recent wars "finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy".

Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn't the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn't deserve my own pity.