We are often more merciful to our animals than we are to each other.
I find it extraordinary that a straightforward if inelegant device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emotional turmoil. Does sex have to be taken so seriously?
The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.
A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.
It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us.
Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.
Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.
Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.
I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.
Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.
The great tragedy of Alzheimer's disease, and the reason why we dread it, is that it leaves us with no defence, not even against those who love us.
The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.
Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.
A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.
History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.
Love, always love. Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for.
Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.
you'd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.
No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.
He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?
Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.
A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.
There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
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