Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.

What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own...

Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.

Atlas said, ‘Must my future be so heavy?’ Hera said, ‘That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.’ ‘How can I escape my fate?’ ‘You must choose your...

Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is.

In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.

even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins…

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the...

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside...

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...

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.

I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I’m not under any...

There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don’t want...

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there....

It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.

When I say ‘I will be true to you’ I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love...

They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.

After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, “I fuck therefore I am”.

When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden...

I can’t be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and...

We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don’t heal by forming a secret society of one – by assessing about the only other ‘one’ we might admit, and being doomed to...

Women always bring it back to the personal,’ said Handsome. ‘It’s why you can’t be world leaders.”And men never do,’ I said, ‘which is why we end up with no world left to lead.

Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life – to be tame or to be wanton. to be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us...

She was a monster, but she was my monster.

Foolish fancy. This is life as it is lived.

Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to...

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.

Credeam ca vrea sa calatoreasca, dar imi spune adevaruri pe care le stiu deja, ca nu e nevoie sa plece de pe insula ca sa vada lumea, ca are destule mari si orase in minte....

When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.

Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.

I wasn’t getting better. I was getting worse.I did not go to the doctor because I didn’t want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this...

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things....

I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don’t stand on the rim, don’t sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and...

I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.

Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you’ve lost forever. There is only now.

Destiny is a worrying concept. I don’t want to be fated, I want to choose.

And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the...

I never wanted to find my birth parents – if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive…I had no idea that you could like your parents or that they...

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...