We should not, perhaps, assume that nature has a purpose.
We are neither of us the people we were then. Let us look on the past only as it gives us pleasure, and to the future with confidence and hope.
This planet is doomed anyway. Eventually the sun will explode or cool and one small insignificant particle of the universe will disappear with only a tremble.
They had lived to see their simple patriotism derided, their morality despised, their savings devalued. They caused no trouble. Millions of pounds of public money wasn’t regularly siphoned into their...
There is much that I remember but which is painful to dwell on. I see no need to write about these things. They are over and must be accepted, made sense of and forgiven, afforded no more than their p...
The young seldom lie convincingly. They haven’t had time to practise like the rest of us.
The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead.
The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.
The very old, he thought, make our past. Once they go it seems for a moment that neither it nor we have any real existence.
The library at Pemberley was as freely open to her as it was to Darcy, and with his tactful and loving encouragement she had read more widely and with greater enjoyment and comprehension in the last s...
The apparent suicide, the certified natural death, the brutal murder - there was a cord which connected them. Its strength might be tenuous and its path convoluted, but when he had traced it, it would...
The New World is not a refuge for the indolent, the criminal, the undesirable of the old, but a young man who has been clearly acquitted of a capital crime, has shown fortitude during his ordeal and h...
She strutted into the room, armour-plated in white linen, belligerent as a battleship. The bib of her apron, starched rigid as a board, curved against a formidable bosom on which she wore her nursing...
One of her parlour borders, Miss Harriet Smith, married a local farmer, Robert Martin, and is very happily settled. They have three daughters and a son, but the doctor has told her it is unlikely that...
Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural cata...
It is never so difficult to congratulate a friend on her good fortune than when that fortune appears undeserved.
I had to make a moral decision. If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise, you are insulting God as well as defying him, don't you think?
Here was normality, sanity, a world she recognized and knew. This emotion, suspiciously like regret, at witnessing the violent destruction of Nightingale House was really too ridiculous
He was a mild-voiced man with the face of a depressed St. Bernard dog who gave the impression of having wandered into the proceedings by mistake.
He had begun the diary less as a record of his life (for whom and why? What life?) than as a regular and a self-indulgent exploration, a means of making sense of the past years, part catharsis, part c...