If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.

we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.

What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.

It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.

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.

Every island to a child is a treasure island.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.