Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?

This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.

I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.

was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial?

In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.

All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.