It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone..

All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing….

She sleepwalked from moment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will..

She lay in the dark and knew everything..

It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and c….

Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever ment….

What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?.

Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?.

For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack..

Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense..

I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends..

Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this par….

I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature..

Oh, I've become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn't this great race..

It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your la….

What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak..

When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Enterin….

He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin..

I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one….

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a….

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State.