I don't want the Thatcher years back, but I don't want the Brown-Prescott years either. I am prepared to give David Cameron his chance - even though he is a Tory.

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

...what he told himself on those sea-soaked nights...Others joined in and it was discovered that every light had a story-no, every light was a story. And the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning.

You had once asked me if I was afraid of death.

I said I was afraid of not living.

I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.

The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?

Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?