What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?

Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.

Real worship involves waiting.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.

... half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter.

Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!