Very often history is a means of denying the past.

There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.

Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.

When we say we can pull resources away from libraries, from culture, from those parts of the education system that are not about utility, what we are really saying is that the life of the mind is unnecessary.

Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.

It is the nature of walls that they should fall.