How do you tell the difference between a person made of flesh and one made of words?

This is what writing does to you, it seems, it turns objects that used to be just things in your life into things that must be described, and at the same time makes them feel increasingly indescribable.

This must be grace, to be defeated by one’s better nature.

She paused; her speech was ever thus. Spirals of deepening particulars, then pauses when she saw she’d strayed from the point.

You would think that living is a kind of scholarship in time, and that the longer we live the more expert we become at coping with it, in the way that, if you play tennis enough, you get used to coping with faster and faster serves. Instead I find that the longer I live the more bemused I become, and the more impenetrable the subject shows itself to be. I sit on a heap of days.

It reminded me that, for all that you love to call a spade a spade, the spade is always a symbol for something else.

Why can’t time go backwards as well as forward? If time’s not a river but a circle, and if you can travel round a circle one way or another and end up where you started, why can’t it go this way and that?

Nothing had changed since those days except that everything had degraded and two decades of light had beaten the colours back a shade.

It is not for us to try to change the world to something that suits us better, but for us to change, to bend to a greater weight.

The Japanese have different words for love. To them, it's plain weird that we love spaghetti and love our children and love our lovers, all with the same word, when surely the thing being described as love is radically different in each case.