The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What’s the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?

I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn’t have achieved anything.

How do you ‘clear’ your thoughts? You have only other thoughts with which to do the job; ‘thoughts’, therefore, are both blockage and broom. I suppose what we mean is that we should stop reasoning and try to ‘feel’ – which presumes that what we ‘feel’ is more valuable than anything we think...

At other times I sit and wait. If nothing comes, I’ve discovered that it’s better just to write something – anything. You can always tear up the piece of paper and throw it away. But if you don’t begin, then nothing comes. You have to submit.

Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don’t know what I’d do.

There is only one life; it is therefore perfect.

Her life had reached an age at which she should no longer be the last to die; there ought to be someone younger than her, a generation of her children who should now be enjoying that luxurious safety of knowing that grandparents and parents still lay like a barrier between them and their mortality.

The partition between love and anger is thin. I suppose it’s a need to protect the self from further wounding that makes people scream at the one they love.

Lonely’s like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.

I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven’t got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel I’m close to it. Some days, I’m so close I can almost smell it.