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What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

Book Change People

They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.

Beach Dark Night

Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

Mystery Safe Safe Places

…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.

Peace Solitude Treasure

Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.

Age Listening People

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

Fire Humans Possession

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

Reader Thinking

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.

Dream Morning Song

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

Color Powerful Thinking

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

Ends Love Story Stories

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

Book People

Lists are a form of power.

Form Lists

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

Art Doe Pleasure

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.

Blood Circulation Human Nature

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.

Curiosity Thinking Virtue

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

Colour Real Thinking

Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.

Balance Greatness Secret

She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.

Children Nice Son

He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster.

Beautiful Clouds Flames

I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.

Looks Moral Beliefs Self