The real truth is that the war didn't have much to do with it except that it provided a perfect limbo in which two people who were too young and too related could start kissing without anything or anyone making us stop.

She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.' 'Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?

I'd like to think life has improved since 1850, despite the long hours we all seem to spend slaving over hot computers, but the psychological journeys remain the same - the search for love, identity, a meaningful place in the world.

It's not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle.

I felt a momentary urge to leap into the sea and swim free of the present.

Somewhere along the line I'd lost the will not to eat.

The things that break your heart when you think there`s nothing left to break