“Love. The wide sea that one word conjures up, all the currents and tides and storms and oily swells of it.”

“I am afraid of reduction. After a lifetime's independence- yes, selfish independence- I am terrified of being reduced to childhood once more, to helplessness, to seas of confusion from which the cruel lucid intervals poke up like rock shoals. I don't want to sit in my chair and be fed, much less do I want to be handed over to medical professionals.”

“Like so many plain cups on the shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don't matter. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and smashes to piece, and you shrug and say to yourself, what a pity. Then you reach for the cup that you use every day, one that you love and use so often that as you stretch out your hand it is already making the shape that fits its curve. You are certain that yesterday it was in its proper place, but now there is nothing. Just air. You have lost something that was so familiar, so much a part of your life that you were not even looking for it. Just expecting it to be there, as always.”

“The dead and not-yet dead, we are company all together.”

“The richness of the whole world reduced to a choice that was not a choice at all, but a sentence.”

“Christmas works like glue, it keeps us all sticking together.”

“I am not afraid of death, which after all can't be far away. What does frighten me, though, is the halfway stage.”