The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.

He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

Téa Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years

It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime.

She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.