“Losing him would, she realised, be unlike anything she had ever experienced before. A marriage is a conspiracy, a shared aspect toward the rest of the society, a code devised over a long history of...”

“Humans make tools. Some animals make tools too. The making and using of tools is important for developing language, how we think and speak. If we do not make anything, it affects our thinking.”

“Kindness is not entered onto the great ledger of civilisation.”

“Her self lagged behind her anger, like a mother picking up after a destructive child.”

“If you said to me, I do not love, I have never loved, then you would sound incomplete. Equally, if you say I do not hate, I have never hated, then you sound like half a man.”

“Horror is the awakening of repressed knowledge, something that you have known all along but kept at the periphery of awareness so that life can go on.”

“Mute in that golden silence hung with green,Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyesRemembrance of all beauty that has been,And stillness from the pools of Paradise.”

“War is what happens when language fails.”

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

“The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.”