“The process of revision should be constant and endless”

“Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. ”

“Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.”

“The self may be royal, but it hungers like a pauper. [...] And it is a king imperilled, a sovereign forever at the mercy of many insurgents, of fear, for example, and anxiety, of isolation and bewilderment, of a strange unspeakable pride and a wild, silent shame. The self is beset by secrets, secrets eat at it constantly, secrets will tear down its kingdom and leave its sceptre broken in the dust.”

“Why, alone of all the more-than-five-hundred-million, should I have to bear the burden of history?”

“Scraps of memory: this is not how a climax should be written. A climax should surge towards its Himalayan peak; but I am left with shreds, and must jerk towards my crisis like a puppet with broken strings. This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”

“Who is the madder,’ Osman the clown whispered into hisbullock's ear as he groomed it in its small byre, ‘the madwoman,or the fool who loves the madwoman?’ The bullock didn't reply.‘Maybe we should have stayed untouchable,’ Osman continued. ‘A compulsory ocean sounds worse than a forbidden well.’ And thebullock nodded, twice for yes, boom, boom.”