“I sit up in bed slowly, feeling the disappointment trickle away like puddles after a rain shower.”

“But the ground shakes, as if something's trying to push up from below, and I think of other people's mothers shaking out their duvets or even God shaking out the fabric of space-time.”

“Homeopaths argue that water has a memory.”

“But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.”

“I feel like crying. There's something so sad about broken concrete.”

“Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a bo...”

“I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A river, suffering because reflections of clouds and tress and not clouds and trees.”

“Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as Ive said before, bugs in amber.”

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

“I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a...”

“Men don't fight for what is theirs. They work for it and they love it with all their hearts. When they do that, they want for nothing.”

“I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a...”

“I have little use for religion as it is practiced, or for astrology, or for belief in witchcraft or omens of good or ill-luck. I think they all stem from some insufficiency in mens minds, perhaps f...”

“It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.”

“So if you can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in - at a face, a bird, the colour of a sari, the beauty of a sheet of water shimmering in the sun, or anything that gives deligh...”