I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.

Yes, we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don't want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn't bother to check their diary when we arrange to meet.

I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.

When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.

When my friend Melot set the trap, I think I knew it. I turned to death full face, as I had turned to love with my whole body. I would let death enter me as you had entered me. You had crept along my blood vessels through the wound, and the blood that circulates returns to the heart. You circulated me, you made me blush like a girl in the hoop of your hands. You were in my arteries and my lymph, you were the colour just under my skin, and if I cut myself, it was you I bled. Red Isolde, alive on my fingers, and always the force of blood pushing you back to my heart.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there

Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.