And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.

May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.

What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

Irony ... may be defined as what people miss.

He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.