I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it.

Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.

How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.

Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run.

It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.

There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.