Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.

Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.