I've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.

Love cannot be measured by its duration.

All the same, my depression and self-hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken bottles, my numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn't go mad, even if that release, that letting-go, was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal.

At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you, too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?

If jealousy was the vindaloo of love, I'd imagined her tongue burning, and such a fire forcing her to spill her truth.

At the deepest level people are madder than they want to believe. You will find that they fear being eaten, and are alarmed by their desire to devour others.

For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died.