“Love is a hollow word which seems at home in song lyrics and greeting cards, until you fall in love and discover its disconcerting power. Depression means nothing more than the blues, commercially ...”

“After you were born, someone turned on a tap. At first it was only a drip, a black drip, and I felt it as sadness. I had felt sad before . . . who hasn't ? I knew what it was like. But I didn't kno...”

“Was there a drain?''No. There was no drain. There isn't one even now'.”

“It is like oil. Like molasses, slow at first.Then one morning I woke up and it was flowing free and fast. I thought I would drown in it. I thought it would drown little you and Susan. I got up, got...”

“I didn't go to bookshops to buy. That's a little bourgeois. I went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were o...”

“Home was where others had to gather grace. Home was what I wanted to flee.”

“There's something about sitting alone in the dark that reminds you how big the world really is, and how far apart we all are.”

“What is it about the sea? Is it because its there?”

“There is a profound ethic to architecture which is different from the other arts.”

“There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.”

“Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tid...”

“And slowly, infinitely slowly, he began to trust. Not the sea, from from it; no one should make that mistake!”