I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.

I think the essence of family is that you have to agree to it, and then supply, out of your imagination and capacity for loyalty, the contents of it.

This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

Limitation is a good discipline because it discourages inappropriate generalization, which distracts attention from the profound, particular complexity that characterizes anything at all.

He [Christ] even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him - a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail.

This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognised for what it is ... So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.

The model for our early bankruptcy laws was Deuteronomy, the idea that, under certain circumstances - in Deuteronomy, it is simply the passage of seven years' time - people are released from debt, simply because they are released from debt. No more debt. You start over again. This has been a very powerful model in this country. It's being destroyed now. People talk about how much new employment, new wealth, and so on are continuously generated in this country.