I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven't got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel I'm close to it. Some days, I'm so close I can almost smell it.

That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.

The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?

I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I'll make sure I never end up here, either.

There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever having really lived.

I suppose it was a dream that lasted really about fifty years. By the time universal education had begun to work properly, say 1925, and the time the first teachers started to hold back information, say 1975. So a fifty-year dream.""I think what's happened is that because they themselves know less than their predecessors, innovators and leaders today have remade the world in their own image. Spellchecks. Search engines. They've remodeled the world so that ignorance is not really a disadvantage. And I should think that increasingly they'll carry on reshaping the world to accommodate a net loss of knowledge.

I suppose I was lucky enough to be educated at a time when teachers still thought children could handle knowledge. They trusted us. Then there came a time when they decided that because not every kid in the class could understand or remember those things they wouldn't teach them anymore because it wasn't fair on the less good ones. So they withheld knowledge. Then I suppose the next lot of teachers didn't have the knowledge to withhold.

And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card.

You put your time where your priority is.

We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time.

Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.

. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.

I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.

It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.

He didn’t ask himself if she was beautiful, because the physical effect of her presence made the question insignificant.

And in that history you're trying to connect to something that once was yours - to something purer, better, something that you lost or something, maybe, that you never knew but that you feel you knew.

It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.

The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.

All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed.

My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It’s that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana’s don’t do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that’s different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn’t work. Sorry about that.

How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.

All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond... flesh, the moment of being alive... then nothing. I had searched in superstition... But there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so... tender. I regretted that I had paid it no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me... I saw that those simple things might be true... I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle. You can believe in something without compromising the burden of your own existence.

Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure.

Grief is a peculiar emotion.

Levade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

[“What is the most real thing you can think of?”]Jacques thought for a long time before answering; he tried to weigh up what was most vital and enduring in all that he had known. Eventually, no longer smiling, he said, ‘Memory’.

Currents of desire and excitement that she had not known or thought about for years now flooded in her. She wanted him to bring alive what she had buried, and to demean, destroy, her fabricated self.

Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years; they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your feet... a vole. It's a remarkable thing in its way, a vole—intricate, beautiful really, marvellous. But does it... Does it help? Does it move the matt

The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.

I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.

With no blame there's no shame. A human society can't exist without shame. Shame is like handedness or walking upright. It's a central human attribute. In fact, it's the first human quality ever recorded.''Where?''Genesis, Chapter Three. The covering of nakedness. The acquisition of shame was the first consequence of consciousness, of the speciating moment. Take shame from me and you are calling me pre-human.

She was so beautiful I had to move away.

Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don't know what I'd do.

We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.

I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.

One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.

He tried to sleep, but his head was filled with the faces of lunatics, their palsied hands, their shattered eyes.

People wonder why you choose certain subjects to write about. The truth is: you don't really. They choose you

There is an arch supported by four vast columns. Etched over hundreds and hundreds of yards of stone, furlongs of stone, there are names: "Who are these, these? The men who died in this battle?""No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in the cemeteries.""These are just the ... the unfound." When she could speak again. From the whole war?"The man shook his head. "Just these fields."Elizabeth sat on the steps. "No one told me. My God no one told me,

Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

The end-of-summer winds make people restless.

Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.