The Children of Men

by P.D. James

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future, is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

She said: “If we are dying we can die as human beings, not as devils. Goodbye, and thank you for seeing the Warden.”

“Did you love your wife?” It was, he saw, a serious question, not a retaliation, and he gave it a serious and truthful answer. “I convinced myself I did when I married. I willed myself into the appropriate feelings without knowing what the appropriate feelings were. I endowed her with qualities she didn’t have and then despised her for not having them. Afterwards I might have learned to love her if I had thought more of her needs and less of my own.”

He thought: Portrait of a marriage. Perhaps most marriages, good and bad, could be summed up in four sentences.