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.

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

It’s the fragment of your past that explains why you have lived your life the way you have done and made the mistakes that you have made.

It’s only a house, she thought. But it was more, too. It was Tibby’s elaborate, respectable shrine to a family life that had long ago ebbed out of it.

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

Death, when it’s right there it doesn’t seem too huge and terrible to let into your mind.

I need them and they need me to need them.

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.

Is nothing in life ever straight and clear, the way children see it?

I can only strive for what is important.