Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?.

How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime..

I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible..

None of us really either know the circumstances of our death or are likely to exert as much control over it as we would like to, but we can certainly….

There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally aliv….

You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go..

It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. S….

What is lawful is not always identical to what is right..

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information..

I'm not against religion in the sense that I feel I can't tolerate it, but I think written into the rubric of religion is the certainty of its own tr….

It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well….

I've always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination..

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shi….

A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

I’ll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn’t touch him now. It was clear enough - one person waiting for another was….

I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'.

Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative..

was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial?.

In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily ration….

These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an ab….

And now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky.….