“It's easy to get a reputation for wisdom. It's only necessary to live long, speak little and do less.”

“Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.”

“It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.”

“For heaven's sake, Darling, keep your crusading instinct [for social justice] under control...It's uncomfortable to live with especially for those of us who haven't got one.”

“Neither man spoke of the past. Darcy could not rid himself of its power but Wickham lived for the moment, was sanguine about the future and reinvented the past to suit his audience, and Darcy could almost believe that, for the present, he had put the worst of it completely out of his mind. p.172”

“We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.”

“The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.”