“Stretch your hand towards those gentle eyes that regard you with such trust”

“Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.”

“She walks towards Karen and Karen feels a cool wind against her skin, and the grandmother holds out both of her knobby old hands, and Karen puts out her own hands and touches her, and her hands feel as if sand is falling over them. There's a smell of milkweed flowers and garden soil. The grandmother keeps on walking; her eyes are light blue, and her cheek comes against Karen's, cool grains of dry rice. Then she's like the dots on the comic page, close up, and then she's only a swirl in the air, and then she's gone.”

“but nothing I ever gave was good for you;it was like white bread to goldfish.they cram and cram, and it kills them,and they drift in the pool, belly-up,making stunned facesand playing on our guiltas if their own toxic gluttonywas not their own faultthere you are, still outside the window,still with your hands out, stillpallid and fish-eyed, still actingstupidly innocent and starved.”

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”

“Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye-lids curve over chaosMy handswhere they touch you, createsmall inhabited islandssoon you will beall earth: a known land, a country.”

“Why can't I believe? she asked the darkness. Behind her eyelids she saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned.It gazed at her. She gazed at it. "You are the effect of a carefully calibrated blend of plant toxins," she told it.Then she fell asleep.”