A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.

When people have supernatural beliefs I think they should be respected but there is no reason why they need to impose them on others.

...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.

Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?

We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.

At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.