The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.

The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.

No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.

I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.

Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.