'In my business,' she said, 'I don't think one has to retire. One gets wiser and wiser all the time. Until one dies. Dies into full knowledge.' - Margaret Drabble

I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I'll be all right; I've got a few veg.

As children, she and Shirley had hated Christmas, for it had marked them out for the lepers that they were: outcasts, treeless, without kin, without comfort, without presents, without past. She preferred the densely populated world she had created, with all its problems.

The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not yet thinned out.