“A man bears the weight of his own body without knowing it, but he soon feels the weight of any other object. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that a man cannot forget- but not himself.”

“...he raised his eyes above the black shapes of the trees and saw a small moon, the colour of a lemon, dragged by clouds across the sky. Moons, he thought, were so that men like himself would know they lived here on earth.”

“There are many things in this life capable of throwing people off course - the death of someone close, the loss of income or health, the realisation that cherished hopes cannot always be fulfilled”

“Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.”

“The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour”

“He knows that there will be days ahead, long, tedious days which have no real beginning or ending, but which run together into night and out of it without changing color, or sound, or meaning. He will lie in his bed feeling the minutes and the hours pass through his body like an endless ribbon of pain because time becomes pain then. Light and darkness become pain; all his senses exist only to receive it, to transmit to his mind again and again, with ceaseless repetition, the simple fact that now he is dying.”

“If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.”