Iris & Ruby

I will continue my path, but I will keep a memory always.

Like so many plain cups on the shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don't matter. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and smashes to piece, and you shrug and say to yourself, what a pity. Then you reach for the cup that you use every day, one that you love and use so often that as you stretch out your hand it is already making the shape that fits its curve. You are certain that yesterday it was in its proper place, but now there is nothing. Just air. You have lost something that was so familiar, so much a part of your life that you were not even looking for it. Just expecting it to be there, as always.

Christmas works like glue, it keeps us all sticking together.

I need them and they need me to need them

I am afraid of reduction. After a lifetime's independence- yes, selfish independence- I am terrified of being reduced to childhood once more, to helplessness, to seas of confusion from which the cruel lucid intervals poke up like rock shoals. I don't want to sit in my chair and be fed, much less do I want to be handed over to medical professionals.

Let her be with her memories. Better that than be aware of this reality.

I can only strive for what is important

Try to capture what you can't bear to be without

I've grieved enough for his life cut short and for mine for running on for so long with so little in it. It's weakness now, but I suppose I am crying out of a general sense of loss. Maybe I am mourning for the human condition.

Learning is important. It is a way to make a life better for yourself and your family.

The dead do not harm us, only the alive.

Got to go on, haven't we? Life goes on.

Wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate.

The dead were just the dead, neither awful nor remarkable. History separated out these individuals and preserved their names where others were obilterated for ever.

Some things I can never forget. I must not. Otherwise what do I have left?

I am not afraid of death, which after all can't be far away. What does frighten me, though, is the halfway stage.

Anything that makes it easier to understand, makes it a little easier to bear.

The future offers everything. Reach out and take whatever you want.

Love. The wide sea that one word conjures up, all the currents and tides and storms and oily swells of it.

I am afraid of losing what I have already valued.

Death, when it's right there it doesn't seem too huge and terrible to let into your mind.

The dead and not-yet dead, we are company all together.

As well as remembering too little, I have seen too much

When you're young, everything carries a twin charge of novelty and infinite possibility

They had lived and known glory, and then they were ddead. She was alive and they were not, and nothing but a heartbeat separated her from them

The richness of the whole world reduced to a choice that was not a choice at all, but a sentence.

It's the fragment of your past that explains why you have lived your life the way you have done and made the mistakes that you have made

What does frighten me is the halfway stage. I am afraid of reduction. After a lifetime’s independence – yes, selfish independence as my daughter would rightly claim – I am terrified of being reduced to childhood once more, to helplessness, to seas of confusion from which the cruel lucid intervals poke up like rock shoals.