“After the war of course it will be like the start of spring, which is always so brilliantly sudden. The leaves will burst back onto the trees and close the gaps between the branches and we shall be startled - shan't we? - s we are startled at the end of every winter. We shall think: oh, I had quite forgotten there were three livable seasons.”

“Let them say whatever gives them comfort.”

“...disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself by hardly moving its lips...”

“When death comes you do not stay for one minute in the place it has visited. Many things arrive after death-sadness, questions, and policemen- and none of these can be answered when your papers are not in order.”

“This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.”

“He really had experienced every tiniest increment of time in the four decades since then, and yet here he was surprised to be suddenly old and crippled. Turned out the rope didn't care if you noticed every daisy on the path to the gallows.”

“Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.”

“Murder me with bombs you poor lonely sod I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself.”

“How well it had suited me, that absolute license to march up to evildoers and demand who, what, where, when and why?”

“Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dess? I though that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. "We must see all scars as beauty. OKay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on dying. A scar means, I survivied.”

“We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.”