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

The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn't tainted with guilt and regret.

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

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.

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

There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.

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.