We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters. - Alexander McCall Smith

The woman shook her head. "Not easy," she said. "I believe that we have much less free will than we think. Quite frankly, we delude ourselves if we think that we are completely free. We aren’t. And that means if dear Bruce must have rather a lot of girlfriends, then there’s not very much he can do about it." Pat said nothing. Bruce had said nothing about the neighbours, and perhaps this was the reason.

Things can end badly, as they sometimes do in life. But if they do, then we know that something is wrong, just as we know it when a piece of music doesn’t resolve itself properly at the end. We know that. We just do. And so we prefer harmony.

Late people talk to us, she thought; they talk to us, but most of the time we are not listening because we are so busy with what we are doing here and now and there are so many problems to be dealt with. But then, when we stop for a moment and catch our breath, we might just hear the voices of the late people who love us, and they are whispering to us, quietly, like the wind that moves across the dry grass; and we know that it is them, although we also know that it cannot be them, for they are late. And so we try hard to hear, just to be sure, and their voices fade away and there is nothing once again.