The one of the great sadnesses of any life is knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds.

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.

Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.

she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.

I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read into hardly anything at all.

If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.