Our lives are politically wound.

Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy.

Let him join the men of the past. Her old lovers were ghosts. None of them had survived; none were missed.

I said, it’s strange, each time I see you again. You look different. Altered. You’re not like I remember. I have to get used to you.

The show brought Claudia sadness finer than any requiem or any gravestone or anything beautiful or sorrowful that she could think of. On afternoons when she wasn’t working with her husband or rotating on the platform in the Human Picture Gallery at Luna, she would go off by herself and pay her dime and linger in the corridors of the exhibit.

First law of an argument: those who remain reasonable will make others seem unreasonable.

Blue that was unstable and misbehaved when left in skin. Blue like the sea that had taken his father. Blue, for his mother’s sake, and for the true colour of every bereaved and bloodless heart when it is collapsing.

All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It’s the law of paternal disenchantments.

There is always half a truth in cliche.

The truth of death is a peculiar thing. For when they leave us the beloved are as if they never were. They vanish from this earth and vanish from the air. What remains are moors and mountains, the solid world upon which we find ourselves, and in which we reign. We are the wolves. We are the lions.