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

Every island to a child is a treasure island.

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

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

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.

I find it extraordinary that a straightforward if inelegant device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emotional turmoil. Does sex have to be taken so seriously?