Still, wouldn’t you, even if entirely secure in your own sense of direction, be at least curious where others were heading, even as you struck out on your own ?

Let me be to my sad self hereafter kind.

Bereavement seemed to work on him as a kind of blanket allergy, making him edgy and irritable to all the outside world. And of course it was reciprocal; the world receded on him.

. . . Most falls aren’t free — there is always the tension, it seems to me, between what you are falling from and what you are falling to.

Let it all go, one foot in the grave and one bag packed. We shall go to our end in the warm glow of the past, burning up the memories, all the clutter given back.