“His anger took many shapes: sometimes soft and familiar, like a round stone he had caressed for so long that is was perfectly smooth and polished; sometimes it was thin and sharp like a blade that could slice through anything; sometimes it had the form of a star, radiating his hatred in all directions, leaving him numb and empty inside.”

“The writer is a kind of hawk; he goes round in the skies, constantly looking with his sharp eyes for the character that he can pick up with his claws. Sometimes he goes round hungry for a week, he cannot catch any characters; and sometimes characters rain on him like heavy rain.”

“Man kills, the things he love the most, sometimes by the virtue of hatred, crime, anger and war and sometimes by dramatizing his activities. But he is not aware that his killings are his own self-image.”

“Sometimes her words sliced down on his before they had even reached his mouth.”

“And leaving you (there aren't words to untangle it)Your life, fearful and immense and blossoming,so that, sometimes frustrated, and sometimes understanding,Your life is sometimes a stone in you, and then, a star.”

“He thought he stood upon an English hillside. Rain was falling; it twisted in the air like grey ghosts. Rain fell upon him and he grew thin as rain. Rainwashed away thought, washed away memory, all the good and the bad. He no longer knew his name. Everything was washed away like mud from a stone. Rain filled him up with thoughts and memories of its own. Silver lines of water covered the hillside, like intricate lace, like the veins of an arm. Forgetting that he was, or ever had been, a man, he became the lines of water. He fell into the earth with the rain.He thought he lay beneath the earth, beneath England. Long ages passed; cold and rain seeped through him; stones shifted within him. In the Silence and the Dark he grew vast.He became the earth; he became England. A star looked down on him and spoke tohim.A stone asked him a question and he answered it in its own language. A rivercurled at his side; hills budded beneath his fingers. He opened his mouth and breathed out spring.He thought he was pressed into a thicket in a dark wood in winter. The trees went on forOver dark pillars separated by thin, white slices of winter light. He lookeddown. Young saplings pierced him through and through; they grew up through his body, through his feet and hands. His eye-lids would no longer close because twigs had grown up through them.”