All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.

We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery.

The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.

Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.

I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'

Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.

Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.