There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.

Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.

Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it's a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.

What I'm not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.

You have to accept that sometimes that's how things happen in this world. People's opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.

You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?

All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.

She always wanted to believe in things.

Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.

The evening's the best part of the day. You've done your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.

The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.

Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened

You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.

I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory...

Your life must now run the course that's been set for it.

If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.

We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.

A part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and-no matter how much we despised ourselves for it-unable quite to let each other go.

After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?

It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.

As with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things

What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.

And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind of world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.

But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.

What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.

She might be a great person, but life's so much bigger than just loving someone.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.

It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just things. When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about things, can you?

And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later...

When you are young, there are many things which appear dull and lifeless. But as you get older, you will find these are the very things that are most important to you.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

It was like being given a maths problem when your brain's exhausted, and you know there's some far-off solution, but you can't work up the energy even to give it a go. Something in me just gave up.

There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life

What I wished more than anything was that the thing hadn't happened at all, and I thought that by not mentioning it I'd be doing everyone else a favor.

Why, Mr Stevens, why, why, why do you always have to pretend?

There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

When Winston Churchill was asked to cut arts funding in favour of the war effort, he simply asked,'then what are we fighting for?

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here.

But God will know the slow tread of an old couple’s love for each other, and understand how black shadows make part of its whole.

Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that -- little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.

Who knows what will come when quick-tongued men make ancient grievances rhyme with fresh desire for land and conquest?

It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate

For some reason, we called it "umbrella sex"; if you fancied someone your own sex, you were "an umbrella.

When it was too late for rescue, it was still early enough for revenge.