I mean, have you ever stopped to realize – not just the miracle that life is – but how basically comic it is despite its griefs? The wonder of it, as Amman Singh says, is that we take it so seriously. One day, poised on my tightrope, I hope to manage a glorious cartwheel, or at the very least a pirouette.

But this was exactly the age, she thought, when life ought to be spent, not hoarded. There had been enough years of comfortable living, and complacency was nothing but delusion. One could not always change the world, she felt, but one could change oneself.

Everything matters terribly to children, you know, they’re fresh and unformed...

Do you like Magda too?” His gaze left the gate to sweep the courtyard. “She seems pleasant enough when she’s not drugged. But then she nearly always is, isn’t she?” He.

Hell is more like boredom, or not having enough to do, and too much time to contemplate one’s deficiencies.

It wasn’t that she had so much character, thought Mrs. Pollifax, but rather that always in her life she had found it difficult to submit. The list of her small rebellions was endless. Surely there was room for one more?

That’s what terrorism is, basically – pure theater. Nothing in particular is ever accomplished by it, other than to focus attention on a small group of people who seize absolute power by threatening everything that holds civilization together.

In the morning when Mrs. Pollifax awoke she realized at once that a fateful day was beginning. She lay and thought about this dispassionately, almost wonderingly, because to every life there eventually came a moment when one had to accept the fact that the shape, the pattern, the direction of the future was entirely out of one’s hands, to be decided unalterably by chance, by fate or by God. There was nothing to do but accept, and from this to proceed, doing the very best that could be done.

There was nothing rational about a wall, whether it encircled Berlin, San Quentin or the ghettos of Warsaw. A wall was a symbol, fortified as much by the idea behind it as by bricks and guns.

I have a flexible mind – I believe it’s one of the advantages of growing old,” she explained. “I find youth quite rigid at times.