I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.

The past isn't over. It isn't even past.

The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.

It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.

There is no such thing as a bad whisky. Some whiskies just happen to be better than others.