Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.

If we must lose wife or husband when we live to our highest right, we lose an unhappy marriage as well, and we gain ourselves. But if a marriage is born between two already self-discovered, what a lovely adventure begins, hurricanes and all.

Why was she always so craven, so apologetic? He had always seen Ruth as separate, good and untainted. As a child, his parents had appeared to him as starkly black and white, the one bad and frightening, the other good and kind. Yet as he had grown older, he kept coming up hard in his mind against Ruth's willing blindness, to her constant apologia for his father, to the unshakeable allegiance to her false idol.

You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking.

We may sooner be brought to love them that hate us, than them that love us more than we would have them do.

People don't contest that I'm British as a black man, but they do contest that I'm English. Too many people are going back to an ethnocentric idea of what being English means.