The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.

I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be

If I could eat only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be rhubarb fool, which I make with ginger and a hint of elderflower cordial.

This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.

Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure.

Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.

The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.