“Half the urge to write is the premonition that later the thought I am having might disappear so I had better write it down while I still have the inclination, however overshadowed this desire is by...”

“A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.”

“He lifted his arm that had been resting on her shoulders and gazed at the words she had written on his hand. He had been branded as cattle are branded to show whom they belong to. The cold mountain...”

“You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.”

“[She] had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the originalone emotion that time could never fade, and t...”

“In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.'What is it then?'It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, bu...”

“I know how soon youth would fade and bloom perish, if, in the cup of bliss offered, but one dreg of shame, or one flavour of remorse were detected; and I do not want sacrifice, sorrow, dissolution ...”