When we learn to read, it’s a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.
Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python.
Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall.
One just spends as much money as one has. Very peculiar that! You never actually have any money. You think, If I had this much money ten years ago, I would have thought I was amazingly rich, but I still manage to spend it all and not have any left.
Y’know, Nature’s unpredictable – that’s why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision.
Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one.
To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.
I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.
I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.
Where you are born – what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own – stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.
I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.
Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.
Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.
Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.
Reading is where the wild things are.
I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.
It’s the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression.
Age is information failure. The body loses fluency.