June 17

The deepest pessimism is silent. Many a jeremiad against humanity is a vote of confidence in its prospects, as it pressuposes future readers to concur with its sentiments.

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There may be mercy killings but there can be no mercy births.

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'You make your own fate,' say people born with the good fortune of never having had to prove it.

May 4

Life is our only frame of reference. Death brings an end to everything, including itself.

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Words on the page sleep, dreamless as hills - until eye read either, line or land.

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Spring drought, and the heaths and woods where I grew up are burning. There is nothing in prospect but more of this: the familiar warping before our eyes. In the hard world coming, we will have to relearn many lost arts - including the art of losing.

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The pity of the world lies not in its horror but in the evolution of a mind capable of imagining that things might be otherwise.

February 27

We prefer to suffer than to recover from those ills that defines us.

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Tragedy is humiliation accepted, comedy humiliation resisted. This is why, at the ends of their careers, most politicians aspiring to the former condition achieve only the latter.

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The mind that reads is too full of itself to mind what is written. So we sit, inattentive to our inattention, regarding ourselves pretending to understand.

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How strange to be afraid of the dark. Even with the lights on, we have to go to sleep in our heads.

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The gall, the presumption of the builder's shout: 'Cheer up mate, it might never happen.' For all he knows, it already has.

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Love is the opposite of hate but friendship is its antidote.