Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place.

Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?" I didn't say anything.

Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy

You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.

What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language.

There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.