“This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to know its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again.”

“I was too fresh from childhood. Subconsciously, my deepest brain still a cupboard of fairy tales, I suppose I believed that if pretty woman was no longer pretty she had done something to deserve it. I had a young girl's belief that this kind of negative aging would never come to me. Death would come to me - I knew this from reading British poetry. But the drying, hunching, blanching, hobbling, fading, fattening, thinning, slowing? I would just not let that happen to moi. ”

“I felt sorry for Mary-Emma and all she was going through, every day waking up to something new. Though maybe that was what childhood was. But I couldn't quite recall that being the case for me. And perhaps she would grow up with a sense that incompetence was all around here, and it was entirely possible I would be instrumental in that. She would grow up with love, but no sense that the people who loved her knew what they were doing - the opposite of my childhood - and so she would become suspicious of people, suspicious of love and the worth of it. Which in the end, well, would be a lot like me. So perhaps it didn't matter what happened to you as a girl: you ended up the same.”

“I had seen this exact same expression and movement before - where? In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love - the death of a man's trying. It read as Haughty Fatigue. Like the name of a stripper.”

“I was realising that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good.”

“At that time in my life I was never late. Only a year later would I suddenly have difficulty hanging on to any sense of time, leaving friends sitting, invariably, for a half hour here or there. Time would waft past me undetectably or absurdly - laughably when I could laugh - in quantities I was incapable of measuring or obeying. But that year, when I was twenty, I was as punctual as a priest. Were priests punctual? Cave-raised, divinely dazed, I believed them to be. ”

“I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it. ”