By the time we left college, I had become my own image: a dandelion in the flower bed of society. Kinda cute, but still a weed.

I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said, “at nine o’clock. Don’t open your door to anyone else.” “Not even my balcony door?” “Especially not your balcony door.

While at Oxford in 1999, I met Jonathan Fortier, who is a Montreal-born Canadian. Despite the challenges of a transatlantic relationship, we remained keen on each other and eventually married in 2002.

Don't underestimate the power of events that happened a long time ago. That is the tragic flaw of modern man.

Great love, you believe, carries the seeds of great sorrow.

We are all cups, and our destiny is poured according to measures we cannot understand, cannot influence.

Was I insane? Maybe. But then, there were many different kinds of insanity. Aunt Rose had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. Some have more, some have less, but only truly abnormal people have none at all. This commonsense philosophy had consoled me many times before, and it did now, too.