That’s how it is with a thing like grief as well. It lies oil slick over everything you do. It will pour out through the gaps in the most ordinary afternoons.

That was the hardest thing, that in the end nothing was healed by medicine or medical expertise – people recovered because they willed those recoveries into being; they fought until they could live in the world again.

Now I am old I wish the young man I used to be had worried less about the past and lived more heedlessly in the present. I suppose I did as much living as I could. But I burn to tell men and women who are still young now how quickly it is going to get behind them, how fiercely they ought to love it while they can.

What do people do with their lives? I mean seriously, literally, hour for hour, what does everyone do? When I was at school I felt perfectly ordinary, just like anyone else, but now it is as if I have forgotten how. I have to do impersonations of a real human being to fit in anywhere or even get served in the supermarket. I have lost my instinct and taste for life, and my days feel like eating with a cold now, knowing you need soup, swallowing, not being able to taste it.

The mind is like a floodplain. The slightest rainfall can leave it awash with old stories that seep into your newer terrors and swell them, drown you under long-forgotten feelings as your life rushes over you.

There are days my life snags on and I keep circling back to them. These are the roots of all I do, and if an observer were to lay those days lodged in my memory over the surface of my present, perhaps all my life would be explained, all problems solved, all wounds revealed.

Every bar in the scores of ourselves is already into memory into imagination, even as we play it out. We might as well listen.

The world holds no trace of what happens in it unless we carve it in with violence or concrete.

The old are a regular subject for sympathy.

The thing about stone is you don't get to the heart of it. It stares back into you, its secret intact and inviolable.