There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.

My paternal grandmother would not light a fire on the Sabbath and piled all Sunday's washing-up in a bucket, to be dealt with on Monday morning, because the Sabbath was a day of rest--a practice that made my paternal grandfather, the village atheist, as mad as fire. Nevertheless, he willed five quid to the minister, just to be on the safe side.

Among the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?

He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.

I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.

A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar

He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language.