Wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate.

I need them and they need me to need them

Wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate.

Things don't matter, people do

Is nothing in life ever straight and clear, the way children see it?

Death, when it's right there it doesn't seem too huge and terrible to let into your mind.

After a lifetime's independence– yes, selfish independence as my daughter would rightly claim – I am terrified of being reduced to childhood once more, to helplessness, to seas of confusion from which the cruel lucid intervals poke up like rock shoals.