Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.

Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out 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.

Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.

No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.

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.

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.