The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised, but essentially the same. A house in the landscape, both shelter and prison.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don’t hold on to them the sea will take them too.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

Most of didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.

But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.

That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.

I didn’t appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole?

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was...