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 sense of loss. Maybe I am mourning for the human condition.

The dead do not harm us, only the alive.

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 up like rock shoals. I don't want to sit in my chair and be fed, much less do I want to be handed over to medical professionals.

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

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

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.

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

Death preserves an ideal.

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