When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.

The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.

(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)

If people believed in eternal damnation they might not be seizing the day quite so much.

Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.

She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.