I did feel when my mother died if anyone was going to haunt me it would be her. And she hasn't, so I think it is possibly the end.

When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.

The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.

Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.

I think about death a lot, I really do, because I can't believe I won't exist. It's the ego isn't it? I feel that I should retreat into a better form of Zen Buddhism than this kind of ego-dominated thing. But I don't know, I mean, I want to come back as a tree but I suspect that it's just not going to happen, is it?

She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.