From where I am, you and my mother and the world are all one. Hyperbole, I know. The world is also full of wonders, which is why I’m foolishly in love with it. And I love and admire you both. What I’m saying is, I’m fearful of rejection.

A contempt for things, for order, cleanliness, must lie on a spectrum with scorn for laws, values, for life itself. What is a criminal but a disordered spirit?

Without a specific destination, the visitors chose routes as they might choose a colour, and even the precise manner in which they became lost expressed their cumulative choices, their will.

Childhoods shine through adult skin, helpfully or not.

Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions.

Early in my conscious life one of my fingers, not then subject to my influence, brushed past a shrimp-like protuberance between my legs. And though shrimp and fingertip lay at differing distances from my brain, they felt each other simultaneously, a diverting issue in neuroscience known as the binding problem.

I wouldn’t mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don’t play the guitar.

However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you’re inside them.

I’m close to my mother’s heart and know its rhythms and sudden turns. And now! It accelerates at her husband’s voice, and there’s an added sound, a disturbance in the chambers, like the distant rattling of maracas, or gravel shuffled softly in a tin. From down here I’d say it’s a semilunar valve whose cusps are snapping to hard and sticking. Or it could be her teeth.

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State.