Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world.

I love the apparent quiet of reading a book. You sit there; you're not really moving. It looks very solitary. It looks very boring, but actually it's the most exciting place because it's going on for you, and you're in that relationship. In that sense, it's like being with a lover. Nobody else can intrude on that space. It's the two of you. It's your own world.

When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.

Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.

It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.