“So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.”

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality says Iris Murdoch. But given the state of the world, is it wise?

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don’t admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It’s the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.

Without death there would be very little progress.

Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Death is the stone into which our oblivion hardens.

Conservatives want live babies so they can train them to be dead soldiers.