“For every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.”

“In those timeless years between infancy and, say, seven what is has always been: in that way children inhabit the realm of myth.”

“At this dim season of the year we hunger for such tales. Winter's tales, they are. We want to huddle round them, as if around a small but cheerful fire... It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year.”

“All those years I'd kept an outline of my father in my head, like a chalk line enclosing a father-shaped space. When I was little, I'd coloured it in often enough. But those colours had been too bright and the outline had been too large...”

“For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.”

“But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge.”

“In ten years, you'll be on a stamp /where anyone at all can lick you.”