That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.

If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?

The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.

. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .

The nicest characters in A Week in December research are, in fact, Muslims - and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.

He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time.