I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

You are a pool of clear water where the light plays

your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before you, I replied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own...

They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.

I don’t own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don’t want to drown. My head is my heart’s lifebelt.

What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. … The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect...

I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they...

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open – the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often...

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

Much of what I have done is left unfinished- not because I left it too soon, not because I was lazy, but because it had a life of it’s own that continues without me. Children,...

There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together.Forgiveness unblocks the future.” (p.225)

The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact...

Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the...

I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they...

They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a...

You have a dress with a décolletage to emphasise your breasts. I suppose the cleavage is the proper focus but what I wanted to do was to fasten my index finger and thumb at the...

In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also...

Even now when I’m furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground. That solves nothing I know, and I spent a lot of time understanding my...

Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.

The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I’m not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been...

It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.

He would love her if she were a wolf that tore out his heart. And he wondered what that said about love.

He did not say so, but the words behind the words told me that he would rather have launched me into a good marriage than watch me row against the tide at my own work....

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior—benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it...

At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn’t get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book...

Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

Explore me,’ you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think...

On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant that...

There are only three possible endings —aren’t there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that.

The journey is about coming home….There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. It is a blood-trail.” (p. 220,222)

You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it’s not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I...

I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy...

There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you...

I have had a lot to put up with,” she said, looking meaningfully at me. “I know the Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a...

Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have...

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn’t....

I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can’t give up love. Maybe it’s the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in...

People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without...

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.

Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.

Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend...

The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops...

If the sun is shining, stand in it- yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass- they have to- because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long,...