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Who remembers what to do? she asks. Who remembers what it means to be more than what this world believes of us?

As every minister knows, a prayer is a superb device for airing an opinion.

Silence may have an eloquence of its own, but only in the long run.

We all know that war destroys mankind, and in spite of their differences in race, creed, and religion, women all across the world despise war because its fruit is nothing but destruction.

“You know, I've been thinking: all the women in the books you like -- Sartre and Camus and all that -- they don't really exist. Not as people. They're only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not -- mostly not; to be beaten up or killed; to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault's cell--”

Technicalities are, however, of more interest to historians than to contemporaries.

Yes, he had been loyal to his friends, but even a wolf is loyal to other wolves.

It can't be that bad. Surely it can't be that bad. There must be a way, only we can't see it yet. A way of making a space for ourselves where we can make the best of ourselves - we just can't quite see it yet. But things move on and by the time you've plotted your position the world around you has changed and you're running - panting to catch up. How can you think clearly when you're running? That is the beauty of the past; there it lies on the table: journals, pictures, a candle-glass, a few books of history. You leave it and come back to it and it waits for you - unchanged. You can turn back the pages, look again at the beginning. You can leaf forward and know the end. And you tell the story that they, the people who lived it, could only tell in part.

We always know how the story ends. What we don't know is what happens along the way.

“So. Tell me. What do you think? Which is better? To take action and perhaps make a fatal mistake - or to take no action and die slowly anyway?”

Not like those of their children who later got caught up in the entangled web of industrialisation. Adah’s Ma had no experience of having to keep up mortgage payments: she never knew what it was to have a family car, or worry about its innards; she had no worries about pollution, the population explosion or race. Was it surprising, therefore, that she was happy, being unaware of the so-called joys of civilisation and all its pitfalls?”

How can it strike so suddenly? Without warning, without preparation? Should it not grow on you, taking its time, so that when the moment comes when you think 'I love', you know or at least you imagine you know what it is you love? How can it be that a set of the shoulders, the rhythm of a stride, the shadow of a strand of hair falling on a forehead can cause the tides of the heart to ebb and to flow?