. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .

My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It's that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana's don't do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that's different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn't work. Sorry about that.

That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.

I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be

I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.