You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?

Anyone informed that the universe is expanding and contracting in pulsations of eighty billion years has a right to ask. What's in it for me?

Try the Lamentations of Jeremiah. They always pick me up.

When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.

Let us hope, I prayed, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.

I think people love each other a little more than they hate each other ... Love has a slim hold on the human corporation, like fifty-one per cent, but it's enough.

I made a tentative conclusion. It seemed from all of this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration: not going to the stars, but learning that one may stay where one is.