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.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn't be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that...that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn't be a deity would it?

The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story.

The Three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. It can't be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; it's a freshness, a plumpness of the cells, that's unearned and temporary, and that nothing can replicate. None of them was satisfied with it, however; already they were making attempts to alter themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces. I didn't blame them, having done the same once myself.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.