Rosie Thomas

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.

Death preserves an ideal.

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

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.

The dead do not harm us, only the alive.

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.

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

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

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