I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love

But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past.

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.

... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.

I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.

When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.