The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped.

It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much.

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

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Sometimes I get so tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them. I know he is afraid of that desert which would be around him if our love were to end, but he can't realise that I feel exactly the same. What he says aloud, I say to myself silently and write it here.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.