“I learnt too late that what is most important to us is always most precious at the moment it occurs, and it is precious in its absolute immediacy and not as some vague confirmation of future directions; since the only certain fact, aside from death, is the flimsiness of everything.”

“Love of my life. Love. Of. My. Life. A retrospectively absurd concept since the most I can say is that he was the love of a particular period of my life, and that it is the random vagaries of life itself, and never love, that define time limits. Meaning, to be in love and wish for its immortality is energy unwisely spent. The idea that we have any choice in the matter is the great illusion.”

“Not only good to be alive, but nice to come with a stranger. Intimacy? For now I want nothing of it. I am simply trying to emerge from the violent unnecessariness of death.”

“We are all, I realise, even as I write this, merely moving closer to our deaths. At the end of this sentence I am closer to mine than I was at the beginning. It's relentless. It's a savage thing. And yet for a long time I've carried with me a sense of life opening out. Evidently it's some kind of protective illusion.”

“What everyone fails to notice, when talking to the other humans, to mothers and lovers and strangers in the streeet, is the one obvious point: 'future corpse, future corpse.”

“In the act itself there is a point at which a light that comes from nowhere starts flickering like a strobe. What happens is not exactly a hallucination. But it wells up from deep in the earth and pounds through my body and there is nowhere to escape from its intensity.”

“His eyes are huge and black. I think about desire. There are flickerings that occur, and we know very little about them. Millimetres of dilation are words in a language.”