“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“A family is a mystery.”

“I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky. ”

“Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.”

“...when I thought he loved me, when I thought we were joined not just for breaths time, but for the long continuance, the hard candies of femur and stone, the fastnesses.”

“The Knowing Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise- comaed and woken, we lie a long time looking at each other.I do not know what he sees, but I see eyes of surpassing tenderness and calm, a calm...”

“[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 ...”