With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.