All the things she couldn’t say, the things no one wanted to hear.

Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow.

There is no ME without books; they’re everything I remember from childhood, from maturity … All that’s happened to me has been coloured, permanently, by my reading.

the romance of solitude and small places, the blurring of identity.