What North Europe thinks of as its history is actually quite provincial and of limited interest. Different sorts of Christian killing each other, and that's about it.

If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

She thougt of sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west.

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.

It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.

Teamwork," Koteks snarled, "is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.

She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’…but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.