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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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...

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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