You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.

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

Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?

The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.

No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.

Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.

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.