“When you can be this, why are you ever anything else? - Broken Verses”

“My ex calls the ochre winter 'autumn' as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark. Broken Verses”

“So she became a woman who held her head high, not in arrogance, or contempt, but because she knew that it was a form of cowardice to make a choice and then pretend you didnt really make it”

“Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question What do these people have to do with us? and What are we doing out there in the world?”

“Abdullah to Kim Burton: "War is like disease. Until you've had it, you don't know it. But no. That's a bad comparison. At least with disease everyone thinks it might happen to them one day. You hav...”

“Difficult but worth it-- that's how my mother had once describe life with Omi.”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wi...”

“My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains....”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“Falling in love is like getting hit by a truck and yet not being mortally wounded. just sick to your stomach, high one minute, low the next. Starving hungry but unable to eat. hot, cold, forever ho...”

“Sometimes it takes a good fall to really know where you stand”

“I have often wondered since at my own firmness. In that dreadful interview with my uncle I had felt, in the whirl and horror of my mind, on the very point of submitting, just as nervous people are ...”