“It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.”

“The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.”

“--a drive in the country, an expedition to a shoe shop a quiet cup of tea under a cloudless sky; each of us had something that made it easier to continue in a world that sometimes, just sometimes, was not as we might wish it to be.”

“You say that you lost your child. You know how I feel then. You know that, don't you? It's a sadness that never goes away.”

“The queue for happiness was not well ordered, he thought; it stretched out and wound round corners, and sometimes, it seemed, the end was so hard to see.”

“Perhaps if you don't know there's a gap, you don't worry about it. If you were a millipede, a tshongololo, crawling along the ground would you look at the birds and worry about not having wings? Probably not.”

“We want to reorganise the world, and that makes our brains jump the gun –sometimes. You look at a newspaper headline, take in one word, and before you know it your brain says: yes, that’s what it says. But it may not.”