People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.

The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.

The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.

Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.

Peoples lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable-deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum. . . . What I wanted [to write down] was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together-radiant, everlasting.

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".