In this uncertain space between birth and death, especially here at the end of the world in Moonlight Bay, we need hope as surely as we need food and water, love and friendship.

Perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.

Living in the modern age, death for virtue is the wage. So it seems in darker hours. Evil wins, kindness cowers. Ruled by violence and vice we all stand upon thin ice. Are we brave or are we mice, here upon such thin, thin ice? Dare we linger, dare we skate? Dare we laugh or celebrate, knowing we may strain the ice? Preserve the ice at any price?

What doesn't quicken dies. That's an indisputable truth of life.

Sometimes, life seems to have a higher meaning. Events unfold in uncanny sequences. Long-forgotten acquaintances turn up with news that changes lives. A stranger appears and speaks a few words of wisdom, solving a previously insoluble problem, or something in a recent dream transpires in reality. Suddenly the existence of God seems confirmed.

There are days when it seems to me that in literature the most convincing depiction of the world in which we live is to be found in the phantasmagorical kingdom through which Lewis Carroll took Alice on a tour.

...he was part of a family whether he wanted to be or not, the family of humanity, more often than not a frustrating and contentious clan, flawed and often deeply confused, but also periodically noble and admirable, with a common destiny that every member shared.