We need time to lose interest in things.

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.

the instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms

The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.

There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.