She lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines she slap breathes in light.

all this Beethoven and rain

How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized

...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.

I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.

You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.