Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love.

The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.

My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.

What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).

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.

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