We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech

War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.

You must not on any account give me credit for being penetrating. I have impressed people that way before, and the result is always disaster.

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be: am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince.

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.