“To me, the persistence of my grandfather's rituals meant that he was unchanged, running on discipline and continuance and stoicism. I didn't notice, and didn't realize, that the rituals themselves were changing, that there was a difference between the rituals of comfort and the preventive rituals that come at the end of life.”

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.”

“In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.”

“I started to feel that nagging sense of shame again, an acute awareness of my own inability to share in his [my grandfather's] optimism.”

“We were seventeen, furious at everything because we didn't know what else to do with the fact that the war was over.”

“Grandfather recently died. He died alone on a trip away from home in a town where no one expected him to be”

“Years of fighting, andm before that, a lifetime on the cusp of it. Conflict we didn't understand...had been at the center of everything.”