Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.

She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.