Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands. The wild can be human work.

He is only a man. Success is a pressure. He cannot quite bear it. It boils and bubbles. And without knowing it, quietly and cruelly, he begins to sabotage his success, because success cannot be borne. It is so very easily done.

I want to be gentle. I am being gentle, but my gentleness is a veneer on raging despair.

There’s a brumous, pewter light outside, as if someone had stuck tracing paper against the glass.

deep repetition compulsion, the term Freud used to describe the need to re-enact painful experiences in order to master them.

I love it because of all the places I know in England, it feels to me the wildest. It’s not an untouched wilderness like a mountaintop, but a ramshackle wildness in which people and the land have conspired to strangeness. It’s rich with the sense of an alternative countryside history; not just the grand, leisured dreams of landed estates, but a his

The ground has a deep crust of snow. Everything is poised as if it might shake itself.

there were myriad definitions of this thing called tragedy that had wormed its way through the history of literature; and the simplest of all was this: that it is the story of a figure who, through some moral flaw or personal failing, falls through force of circumstance to his doom.

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though y