p 78 "His sister openly voiced her disparagement of psychiatry. "It isn't even a scientific discipline, just the last resort of the desperate or the indulgence of fashionable neuroses. You can't even describe the difference between mind and brain in any way which makes sense. You've probably done more harm in the last fifty years than any other branch of medicine and you can only help patients today because the neuroscientists and the drug companies have given you the tools. Without their little tablets you would be back where you were twenty years ago."
p 84 "Belief had its social uses. We haven't exactly found an effective substitute. Now we construct our own morality. "What I want is right and I'm entitled to have it." The older generation may still be encumbered by some folk memory of Judeo-Christian guilt, but that will be gone by the next generation."
p160 "Now for the first time she felt a terrible grief. It wasn't that a man was dead and had died horribly. They were, she knew, only partly a reaction to shock and terror. Blinking her eyes and willing herself to calmness, she thought, it's always the same when someone we know dies. We weep a little for ourselves; but this moment of profound sorrow was more than the sad acceptance of her own mortality, it was part of a universal grieving for the beauty, the terror and the cruelty of the world."
p 282 "Love, the satisfaction of being wanted, is always something of a triumph. Very few people mind confessing that they have been desirable. Where sexual mores today are concerned, it isn't adultery that's contemptible."
352 "I said that believers can deal with guilt by confession, but how could those of us without faith find our peace? I remembered some words I'd read by a philosopher, I think Roger Scruton. "The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation."
Sample description, p 79
" England had rejoiced in a beautiful October more typical of spring's tender vicissitudes than of the year's slow decline into this multicoloured decrepitude. Now suddenly the sky, which had been an expanse of clear azure blue, was darkened by a rolling cloud as grimy as factory smoke. The first drops of rain fell and he had hardly time to push open his umbrella before he was deluged by a squall. It felt as if the accumulated weight of the cloud's precarious burden had emptied over his head. There was a clump of trees within yards and he took refuge under a horse chestnut, prepared to wait patiently for the sky to clear. Above him the dark sinews of the tree were becoming visible among the yellowing leaves and, looking up, he felt the slow drops falling on his face. He wondered why it was pleasurable to feel these small erratic splashes on skin already drying from the rain's first assault. Perhaps it was no more than the comfort of knowing that he could still take pleasure in the unsolicited benisons of existence. The more intense, the grosser, the urgent physicalities had long lost their edge. Now that appetite had become fastidious and sex rarely urgent, a relief he could provide for himself, at least he could still relish the fall of a raindrop on his cheek."
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