Love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done.

Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.

That's one of the things they do. They force you to kill within yourself.

I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.

He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around.

I never thought much at the time about what the phrase meant, but it had something to do with metal, with armor, and that's what I would do, I would steel myself. I would pretend not to be present, not in the flesh.

How easy it is to invent humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

Time's a trap, I'm caught in it.

It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavours, in the air or on the tounge, half-colours, too many.

But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh.

The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being belivable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

It isn't running away they're afraid of. We couldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then

You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound.This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter.

Photography is an attempt to capture something fleeting

The best books, they don't talk about things you never thought about before. They talk about things you'd always thought about, but that you didn't think anyone else had thought about. You read them, and suddenly you're a little bit less alone in the world.

As a little kid, Peter had figured out that once you reached a certain age, somebody just handed you all the knowledge you'd need in order to be an adult. But it turned out that wasn't how it worked at all.

There is a will that exist, a desperate, continual, constantly renewed effort to place some people on a level below you, not to be on the lowest rung of the social ladder.