How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?

All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.

There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.

Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?

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 its gone, you'll know what a gift love was. you'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.

However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. we may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe.