Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else...But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.

Right. I'd forgotten about her.' He shook his head. 'That keeps happening.

That feeling of finishedness does not come all at once, and it is not easily won, but I think once you get there it is hard to go back.

Stupid human voices always ruining everything.

The truth hurts because it's real. It hurts because it mattered. And that's an important thing to acknowledge to yourself.

We look back to the most important moment in our history, and that becomes the dividing line between what we were and what we are now.

Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.