I'd become more adept at being with other people; I'd lowered my expectations of them and learned to let my mind drift into neutral when they spoke.
I don’t know your life history, but I think children need to believe in powers outside themselves. That’s why they read books about witches and wizards and God knows what. There is a human need for th...
I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.
But you must live your own life eventually. You have one chance only.
But I can hardly remember what it felt like. It's like everything that happens to you. It doesn't feel real.
At other times I sit and wait. If nothing comes, I’ve discovered that it’s better just to write something – anything. You can always tear up the piece of paper and throw it away. But if you don’t begi...
And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal...
The deeper into the sensation she went, beneath his weight and his urging, the more it was like going into a room of utter darkness, which she felt was familiar from a time before her birth; it was so...
Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.
My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It’s that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana’s don’t do psychological consistency. And the tiny p...
In God's name, she thought, let the more loving one be someone else; for me it is beyond endurance.
I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I'll make sure I never...
I liked slicing through the beige brain when it had been fixed; the texture reminded me of cooked cauliflower. It was wonderful to hold this shrunken organ in your hands, the formaldehyde running down...
He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.
He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold...
But the weight of her anguish over Gregory – this one missing airman, this unreliable, perhaps unworthy man – filled her whole upper half, diaphragm, lungs, ribs, shoulders, with such crushing gravity...
What had gone completely was the memory of what made her human, her ways and her thoughts. The withholding of these details was like a torment. When he tried to bring her back to mind, he could not he...
People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don't have time. Or the right words. But that's what books do. It's as though your...
Our own choices might not be as good as those that are made for us.
It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.