We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.

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

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

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.

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.