It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.

They haven't left us much to believe, have they? — even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity.

Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.

It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much.

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.