Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.

In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.

It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.

I am the cat that walks alone.

The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters

Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well.