With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.

With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.

Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.