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.

It didn't hurt, did it? When I hit you?" "Sure. Fractured skull. Concussion, the lot..." "But seriously, Kath. No hard feelings, right? I'm awfully sorry. I honestly am.

For their kind do not know what it is to risk everything in the endeavor to rise above the mediocre.

In fact, the harder he tried, the more laughable his efforts turned out.

How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly?

Why should one not enjoy in a light-hearted sort of way stories of ladies and gentlemen who fall in love and express their feelings for each other, often in most elegant phrases?

Because somewhere underneath, 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.

Silence is just as likely to indicate the most profound ideas forming, the deepest energies being summoned.

Are you still there, Axl?” “Still here, princess.

The giant, once well buried, now stirs. When soon he rises, as surely he will, the friendly bonds between us will prove as knots young girls make with the stems of small flowers.

You'll figure it out! You get on your plane and I'll get on mine. And we'll see which one crashes!

Plenty of couples, they start off loving each other, then get tired of each other, end up hating each other. Sometimes though it goes the other way.

It might be just some trend that came and went," I said. "But for us, it’s our life.

I don't know why, but it didn't seem an option for more than one of us to storm off, and I wanted to make sure that one was me.

A couple may claim to be bonded by love, but we boatmen may see instead resentment, anger, even hatred. Or a great barrenness. Sometimes a fear of loneliness and nothing more.

The rest of my life stretches out as an emptiness before me.

We're the only ones who care now. The likes of you and me, Ono, when we look back over our lives and see they were flawed, we're the only ones who care now.

Democracy is a fine thing. But that doesn't mean citizens have a right to run riot whenever they disagree with something. #Page: 120

If disappointments do come, you will carry on still. You will say, just as he does, I am so lucky.