But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.

Beauty alters the grain of reality.

There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.

Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn't quite sure what—apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.