Ours is a world which feels so unsettled and dangerous in large ways, whether its terrorism or global financial meltdown or climate change - huge things that affect us deeply, and yet things about which we can do, individually, very little.

I suppose I really seemed mad, then; but it was only through the awfulness of having said nothing but the truth, and being thought to be deluded.

Ours is a world which feels so unsettled and dangerous in large ways, whether its terrorism or global financial meltdown or climate change - huge things that affect us deeply, and yet things about which we can do, individually, very little.

..this feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. it covers me, like skin.

It's a curious, wanting thing.

I knew that I couldn't lie beside her, without wanting to touch her. I couldn't have felt her breath come upon my mouth, without wanting to kiss her. And I couldn't have kissed her, without wanting to save her.

It was heavy, and I staggered when I lifted it; but it was strangely satifying to have a real burden upon my shoulders – a kind of counterweight to my terrible heaviness of heart.