Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.