I am not afraid of death, which after all can’t be far away. What does frighten me, though, is the halfway stage.

Some things I can never forget. I must not. Otherwise what do I have left?

Death preserves an ideal.

Anything that makes it easier to understand, makes it a little easier to bear.

The dead and not-yet dead, we are company all together.

When you’re young, everything carries a twin charge of novelty and infinite possibility

They had lived and known glory, and then they were ddead. She was alive and they were not, and nothing but a heartbeat separated her from them

The richness of the whole world reduced to a choice that was not a choice at all, but a sentence.

Things don’t matter, people do

Learning is important. It is a way to make a life better for yourself and your family.

As well as remembering too little, I have seen too much

Like so many plain cups on the shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don’t matter. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and...

I need them and they need me to need them

I am afraid of losing what I have already valued.

I’ve grieved enough for his life cut short and for mine for running on for so long with so little in it. It’s weakness now, but I suppose I am crying out of a general...

I can only strive for what is important

Christmas works like glue, it keeps us all sticking together.

The dead do not harm us, only the alive.

The future offers everything. Reach out and take whatever you want.

I am afraid of reduction. After a lifetime’s independence- yes, selfish independence- I am terrified of being reduced to childhood once more, to helplessness, to seas of confusion from which the cruel lucid intervals poke...

I will continue my path, but I will keep a memory always.

Wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate.

Let her be with her memories. Better that than be aware of this reality.

The dead were just the dead, neither awful nor remarkable. History separated out these individuals and preserved their names where others were obilterated for ever.

Try to capture what you can’t bear to be without