to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.

A picnic may well be a metaphor for life. The essentials for happiness are the right company, moderate if sanguine expectations and a reasonable standard of physical sustenance and comfort, the whole being bedeviled by the belief that there is always something better to be had if only one presses on.

Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love.

Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.

Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.