While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, <i>Don Quixote</i> suffers from one fairly serious flaw — that of outright unreadability. - Martin Amis

His last words were spoken to a woman, to the nurse who was holding his hand. Perhaps we all have the last words ready when we go into the last room. Perhaps the thing about last words is not how good they are, but whether we can get them out. What Larkin said faintly was, "I'm going to the inevitable."

"Nuclear weapons could bring about the Book of Revelation in a matter of hours; they could do it today. Of course, no dead will rise; nothing will be revealed (nothing meaning two things, the absence of everything and a thing called nothing). Events that we call "acts of God" — floods, earthquakes, eruptions — are flesh wounds compared to the human act of nuclear war: a million Hiroshimas. Like God, nuclear weapons are free creations of the human mind. Unlike God, nuclear weapons are real. And they are here."

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)