For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living.

It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words "justice," "compassion," "society," "struggle," "evil," would be unheard echoes on an empty air.

however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.

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.

you'd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.

Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.