“If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it....”

“[H]alf blinded you embraced your own body, and with the warmth still under your jacket, you walked up the pavement along the square, moving through the grey light, and let your thoughts seep softly in, undisturbed, on the way up to the station, but also walking as one of many in the chill of December. I liked the feeling being a we, being more than myself, being larger than myself, being surrounded by others in a way I had never experienced before, of belonging, and it made no difference if those who walked to the left or the right of me, in front or behind me on this street, did not share the same feeling.”

“It was as if gravity was suspended. It was like dancing, I thought, although I had never danced in my whole life. We were never to walk like that again.”

“I distinctly heard the blackbird from the top of a spruce tree, and clear as glass I heard the lark high up and several other birds whose song I did not know, and it was so weird, it was like a film without sound with another sound added, I was in two places at once, and nothing hurt.'Yahoo!' I screamed, and could hear my own voice, but it seemed to be coming from a different place, from the great space where the birds sang, a bird's cry from inside that silence, and for a moment I was completely happy.”

“Time is important to me now, I tell myself.Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but only be time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by. so that it grows distict to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.”

“I'm sorry I laughed...I know it isn't funny for you. It was incredibly stupid of me to laugh. Does it hurt a lot anywhere?'Not really,' I said.'Only a bit in your soul?''Maybe a bit.''Let it sink,' he said. 'Just leave it. You can't use it for anything.”

“I went up above the quay past the steps to the hotel. I saw a man through the window with a beer in his hand, and another man with a basket full of eggs. I was feeling heavy now, and tired, and I stood there leaning backwards with my hands crossed behind my back at the end of the breakwater before I walked on to the beach on the other side and some way along on the hard-frozen white sand. It had started to blow a bit, and it was still cold with no snow, so I took off my scarf and tied it round my head and ears and sat down in the shelter of a dune and blew into my hands to warm them before I lit a cigarette. Poker ran along the edge of the water with a seagull’s wing in his mouth, and I was so young then, and I remember thinking: I’m twenty-three years old, there is nothing left in life. Only the rest.”