Quotes from Salley Vickers

We all long for someone with whom we are able to share our peculiar burdens of being alive.

Stories are all we humans have to make us immortal.

There are few things more mysterious than endings. I mean, for example, when did the Greek gods end, exactly? Was there a day when Zeus waved magisterially down from Olympus and Aphrodite and her lover Ares, and her crippled husband Hephaestus ) I always felt sorry for him), and all the rest got rolled up like a worn-out carpet?

The Abbe Paul looked at Agnes rather as Alain had, with respect. 'How sensible. People are desperate to probe mysteries which for the most part are best left unprobed. It is the modern curse: this demented drive to explain every blessed thing. Not everything can be explained. Nor should be, I think.

Beware, beware of those who care,' as some wise person said. Not that I'm suggesting there is anything wrong with caring. But as Granny Maud used to say, 'Fine words butter no parsnips,' and she might have added, 'Caring should be felt and not heard.

And I have come to see that the better you treat someone, the more you love them – which is why you must never let someone treat you badly, for the worse they do to you, the more they will hate you. I

Guilt. Does anyone escape it? Is guilt the reason we make up stories?

That boy held my heart in a way that felt molecular.

I put it to you, Doctor, that our gods are what good and bad once were before they became categories un human reasoning.

It is itself a kindness to accept kindness, Doctor.

we emphatically do not want to find that we have reached such a state of dearth in our society that we must provide food banks for the imagination as well as, as we so regrettably have to do today, for the physical body.

Know thyself. Then know that you are a human being, a member of the species of mankind. So know first and foremost that you do not know, and what you claim to know is almost certainly a means of distracting yourself from what you really know.

Is it true we'd rather be ruined than changed?

From the gods' perspective all ways are the same and all roads will be travelled in the end. It's only a matter of time.

without great wisdom and strength humankind should pray to be spared the experience of love.

There's always another way. But we can only see as we are. And no power on earth, nor above or below it, not even yours, Dr Freud, can deflect the human will when it has its sights set on one direction.

he made his story into an immortal one, so far as any story is. — But, Dr Freud, stories are all we humans have to make us immortal. 18 —

I need to tease out how far I was to blame. You'll understand that, Dr Freud. Guilt. Does anyone escape it? Is guilt the reason we make up stories?

We tend not to notice what is not there when often absence is the more vital thing.

save us both from the trouble that would arise if I was to disturb Mama's sleep. When