…I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt.

This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.

I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Shuttered like a fan no-one suspects your shoulder blades of wings.

For me, the most painful thing is the thought of shelves without books. This is the problem with the digital thing. I do not want to see it on electronic. I do not want to see all of those indices on Kindle. I don't want this physical object to disappear, because when it's there and it's present, it's continually suggesting new relationships in a way that an electronic index couldn't.

What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.

I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society?