You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other.

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

It is the storytellers task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

I couldn't help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I've forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.

In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.

He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.