If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.

The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.

The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.

You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.

What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.