No one should be allowed to give back the gift of life, unless they are very old and full of tears, when the body outlives the spirit, when they should be allowed to join the others who've already gone.

Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth; left to itself, it sweeps in like the tide.

You will find that women who are pregnant often don't want to be and women who aren't desperately envy those who are. Labour wards are always full of very punitive people.

No one seemed able to look at themselves, coolly, from the outside. Their reality was all that could be seen in the light cast ahead by their own wishful thinking.

Food is the supremest of pleasures.

I know truth is more like a mountain that has to be scaled. The peak of the mountain pierces the clouds and can only rarely be seen, and has never been reached. And what you see of it, moreover, depends upon the flank of the mountain you stand upon, and how exhausted getting even so far has made you. Virtue lies in looking upwards, toiling upwards, and sometimes joyously leaping from one precarious crag of fact and feeling to the next.

One friend dies and we remain indifferent; another dies, perhaps less intimate, and we see ourselves as dead, and weep, mourn, tear our hair or find ourselves caught up in the madness of the wake, competing with others as to who was closest, now suffers most.