What a joy it is to dance and sing!

I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.

Why do you do up your hair in those tortured plaits, now, Melanie? Why? Because, she said. You know that's no answer. You're spoiling your pretty looks, pet. Come here. She did not move. He ground out his cigarette on the window-ledge and laughed. Come here, he said again, softly. So she went.

To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?

I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.

Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman.

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.