Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.

Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

I read a piece by a guy out in Alberta that said Canadians are lazy because they're not patenting enough new inventions. I disagree. Canadians invent a lot of stuff. Actually patenting them is expensive.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance.

But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.