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

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!

Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.

Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.

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.

It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.