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

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.

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?

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

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.

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