Held

“... while Helena stood, unable to move from behind the counter, looking at the door, knowing something had just occurred and not knowing what it meant; as if his future had somehow intercepted her, jostling it out of place, just enough to swerve her off course, the single centimetre one way or another that saves one or sets one in the path of an oncoming car.”

Fate

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“Do we really need our own misery to teach us to be kind?”

Kindness

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“Loneliness is not emptiness but negation, with all its agonising precision, its absoluteness; exact, active; in every depth of detail, it is the inverse of love, the dark replica of love.”

Loneliness

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“Someone once told me a joke," he said. "I'd like to be a pacifist, but people keep getting in the way.' I made a decision to fight for my friend in prison. It was a deliberate decision. It isn't the only way-it's just something I decided.”

DecisionPrisonJokePacifist

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“To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same.”

War

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“Who can say what happens when we are remembered?”

Death Of A Loved One

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“The nights he had wept next to his sleeping wife, ashamed of his hunger: the longing that his parents might come to him.”

Grief

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“Was rescue always a kind of love? Peter didn't know, and he was tired now; he would leave it to Alan and his philosophers. But he did know, with certainty, that love was always a kind of rescue. Even when he had no tears left, he would have tears for Anna.”

LoveGrief

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“When John remembered his father, he seemed only able to recall fragments - deep feeling, but only pieces - moments together, not even days. Years, an entire life - now only this handful, this heartful.”

Grief

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“And Hertha knew there was no medicine more important than knowing there was someone in the world who knew the very heart of you, and would protect you. Without irony, Hertha thought, mothers of all lands, unite.”

Mothers

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“We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?”

Death

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“The fight for necessities - water, food, shelter, schools, hospitals, a common good. As always, he would take his tipper lorry of language and empty the horror in plain view, so no one could claim they had not known. There was nothing more to say and, of course, he would go on saying that same nothing.”

WartimeJournalists

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“She did not understand for some time why he had plucked her - middle-aged, a pear turning soft in the bowl - from the bookshop. At first, she thought it was because of what she'd been reading behind the counter - Mr. Ayles never objected to his staff reading once the chores were done. And then she thought it was because he had identified her as a specimen of a particular kind, a woman who, for one last moment, was still able to be wounded in that one way; who might, with a single touch, be brought back to life exactly once more. She was convinced it was this gratitude in particular - ignited by his pity - that he could never have enough of, one source of the great flow of gratitude his presence seemed to arouse in everyone.”

Middle Aged Women

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“Reading in bed is a precision art - knowing the right wattage, high enough to ready by, low enough to fall asleep with the light still on, choosing books not for their content but for their size and weight, knowing the right position in bed so the book won't slide off and hit the floor and wake you again.”

Reading In Bed

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