Her collarbones like wings that spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by skin.

That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

If you're happy in a dream, does that count?

This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.

Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.

When she listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch.

His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.

He could do only one thing at a time. If he held her, he couldn't kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn't see her. If he saw her, he couldn't feel her.

Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.

To understand history, ' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.

How history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws.

There are moments when a rope's end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit.

Most castles in the air are never built. But Walt Disney's was.

I got a divorce eleven years later on the grounds of cruelty, which is still not easy in England.

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose

The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the most powerful engines of civilization ever invented.

I've learned to keep my work on the stage or on the screen.

God multiplies intelligence, which communicates itself, like fire, ad infinitum. Light a thousand torches at one touch, the flame remains always the same.

I do believe that leaders have to be held to a higher standard, especially Christian leaders. I put myself in that camp.

We are here to do a great work because the mind that created us knew what it wanted us to do when it created us.

What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?