We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving.

Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?

In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.

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

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

Old age makes caricatures of us all.

Love, always love. Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for.