“The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.”

“[Literature is] the best way of telling the truth; it’s a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.”

“You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were the childof a happy marriage, then you ought to have a better thanaverage marriage yourself – either through some geneticinheritance or because you’d learnt from example? But itdoesn’t seem to work like that. So perhaps you need theopposite example – to see mistakes in order not to makethem yourself. Except this would mean that the best way forparents to ensure their children have happy marriageswould be to have unhappy ones themselves. So what’s theanswer?”

“It is important to understand that in the modern world we prefer the replica to the original because it gives us the greater frisson. I leave that word in French because I think you understand it well that way.”

“Someone once said that his favourite times in history were when things were collapsing, because that meant something new was being born. Does this make any sense if we apply it to our individual lives? To die when something new is being born - even if that something new is our very own self? Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappointments, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.”

“...how time first grounds us and then confounds us....give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.”

“You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?”