Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?

We are often more merciful to our animals than we are to each other.

He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?

We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving.

[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.

It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.