I’d like to die anytime after the age of 90—in my sleep!

It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death. ... I told my friends Kate and Allen, “I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying.” “We’ll wheel you outside,” they said.

Coming offstage after a five-minute standing ovation, falling into the arms of my lover, and having the doctor look at me and say, “This is impossible! She looks much too young to go!”

That process depends on what you are dying of. The body can fail in ways that are extremely distressing, slowly and painfully, demanding much stoicism, or it can switch off with little more than a flash of dizziness. In my family we seem to have been uncommonly lucky in that respect. There was the 82-year-old uncle who was at a meet of the Norwich Stag Hounds, enjoying a drink with friends, when crash! And he fell off his horse, dead. There was the cousin in her eighties who fell dead as she was filling a kettle to make tea, and the other cousin, 98, who slipped away so gently that the sister who was holding her hand didn’t realise that she had stopped breathing.

Putting my grandchildren to bed.

A sense of humor, integrity, intelligence. Also, factual accuracy.

I had to ask people about this, because I couldn’t think of anything, and the consensus seems to be: a general lack of self-awareness.

Piety. But only when people are overly pious. You can’t be too just. Or too courageous.

Some of the worst advice I've been given doesn't sort of sound like terrible advice. And maybe it's the way I've internalized the advice. Always stand up for your principles is probably good advice. The way I've internalized it is burn your bridges. So I think that--you know what I mean?