Nothing Fails Like Failure

I Used To Be A Reasonably Careless And Adventurous Person Before I Had Children; Now I Am Morbidly Obsessed By Seat-belts And Constantly Afraid That Low-flying Aircraft Will Drop On My Children's School.

Because If One Has An Image, However Dim And Romantic, Of A Journey's End, One May, In The End, Surely Reach It, After No Matter How Many Detours And Deceptions And Abandonings Of Hope. And Hope Could Never Have Been Entirely Abandoned, Even In The Worst Days.

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.

Why Can't People Be Both Flexible And Efficient?

Men And Women Can Never Be Close. They Can Hardly Speak To One Another In The Same Language. But Are Compelled, Forever, To Try, And Therefore Even In Defeat There Is No Peace.