When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.

With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return.

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.

Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late!