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

There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

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.

He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.