Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.

I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite shoes.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?

Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?

There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.