Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.

Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.

Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.

But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.

What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.