What Really Annoys Me Are The Ones

I'd Rather Be At The End Of A Dying Tradition, Which I Admire, Than At The Beginning Of A Tradition Which I Deplore.

There Would Be More Genuine Rejoicing At The Discovery Of A Complete New Novel By Jane Austen Than Any Other Literary Discovery, Short Of A New Major Play By Shakespeare.

Our Desire To Conform Is Greater Than Our Respect For Objective Facts.

Lord Knows What Incommunicable Small Terrors Infants Go Through, Unknown To All. We Disregard Them, We Say They Forget, Because They Have Not The Words To Make Us Remember. ... By The Time They Learn To Speak They Have Forgotten The Details Of Their Complaints, And So We Never Know. They Forget So Quickly, We Say, Because We Cannot Contemplate The Fact That They Never Forget.

Auntie Phyl's Last Months In The Care Home Were Extra Pieces. Age Is Unnecessary. Some Of Us, Like My Mother, Are Fortunate Enough To Die Swiftly And Suddenly, In Full Possession Of Our Faculties And Our Fate, But More And More Of Us Will Be Condemned To Linger, At The Mercy Of Anxious Or Indifferent Relatives, Careless Strangers, Unwanted Medical Interventions, Increasing Debility, Incontinence, Memory Loss. We Live Too Long, But, Like The Sibyl Hanging In Her Basket In The Cave At Cumae, We Find It Hard To Die.