“Youll get over it Its the clichs that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You dont get over it because it is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are ...”

“As your lover describes you, so you are.”

“Earth is ancient now, but all knowledge is stored up in her. She keeps a record of everything that has happened since time began. Of time before time, she says little, and in a language that no one...”

“Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surp...”

“I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.”

“What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to ...”

“Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.”

“But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?”

“Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.”

“Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.”

“And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the obser...”

“Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?”

“Sometimes two people have to fall apart, to realize how much they need to fall back together.”

“Good literature is one key to peace. When we stop reading each other, when we stop paying attention to each other's words and stories, we too easily oppose one another.”

“There is only one motive for writing a novel: to be published and read. To me there is no distinction between the mystery novel and the novel, only between good books and bad books. A good book tak...”