...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular-an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.

I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.

Even death after a long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. ... Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today?

Somewhere between fear and sex passion is.

In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead.

We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.