A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.

So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.

Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.

You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.

We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.

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.

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