“At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.”

Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.

Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.

The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.

Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.

It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.

And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.

I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.

The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.

Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.

Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?

If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.

Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”

Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.

Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.

My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.

The voice of reason is more to be regarded than the bent of any present inclination; since inclination will at length come over to reason, though we can never force reason to comply with inclination.

It’s no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.

A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.

I asked these Indians: “Do men ever make Chicha?” My question was met with gales of laughter. The women howled. Bent over in hilarity, one replied, “Men can’t brew. Chicha made by men would only make gas in the belly.

She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life…

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

The young bamboo can be easily bent, but the full grown bamboo breaks when it is bent with force.