I stood there in the kitchen, watching her staring across the meadow still searching for her nemesis and I thought, suddenly, that this is all our lives - this is the one fact that applies to us all, that makes us what we are, our common mortality, our common humanity. One day someone is going to come and take us away: you don't need to have been a spy, I thought, to feel like this.

I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.

The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.

We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.

She's half mad and three parts drunk.

Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck.

It's true: lives do drift apart for no obvious reason. We're all busy people,we can't spend our time simply trying to stay in touch. The test of a friendship is if it can weather these inevitable gaps.