“She saw the children. They have been given viruses to educate them. From three weeks old they could speak and do basic arithmetic. By ten, they had been made adult, forced like flowers to bloom early. But they were not flowers of love. They were flowers of work, to be put to work. There was no time.”

“She thought she was brave, but she did not have that kind of courage. To face the men who controlled the torturers, the lists, the surveillance, and say: I am going to do the very thing you say I must not do.And yet they were right.How were things to get better if no one fought?”

“God, the woman must have been a pain. When she was alive.”

“He might as well have been talking English, for all Mae understood him.”

“This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops.”

“Literature for me… tries to heal the harm done by stories. (How much harm? Most of the atrocities of history have been created by stories, e.g., the Jews killed Jesus.) I follow Sartre that the freedom the author claims for herself must be shared with the reader. So that would mean that literature is stories that put themselves at the disposal of readers who want to heal themselves. Their healing power lies in their honesty, the freshness of their vision, the new and unexpected things they show, the increase in power and responsibility they give the reader.”

“There is no man so unsuited for the task of speaking about memory as I am, for I find scarcely a trace of it in myself, and I do not believe there is another man in the world so hideously lacking in it.”