I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

confession ran in the family.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.

for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower.