With all respects to heaven, I like it here.

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.

He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.

...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.