I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time.

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

What we forgot as children is that our parents are children, also. The child in them has not been satisfied or met or loved, often.

Later as the day cools and they have gone in, the cry of the corncrake will carry across those same fields and over the lake to the blue-hazed mountain, such a lonely evening sound to it, like the lonely evening sound of the mothers, saying it is not our fault that we weep so, it is nature's fault that makes us first full, then empty.

Kindness. The most unkind thing of all.

I am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles.

Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.