Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.

Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.

Nothing fails like failure

There are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion of movement were inseparably connected with the notion of discovery, as though each displacement of the body were a displacement of the soul.

Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.