The animals are the true farmholders. Tolerant and aloof, they allow the farmers to comb out their thick fleeces, to assist them in difficult births, and to skin them when they die.

He cried because he was in pain, but he did not know what the pain was.

and I realised that it’s easier for me to imagine not knowing which sex I’ll be tomorrow morning,

“Keep your shadow to yourself,

I looked at the dancers and wondered, why are they happy? Aren’t they old? Why do they act like they’d got free?

Nobody knows how old the houses are, because they have been rebuilt forever. Each one sits in its gardens without respect to the position of any of the others, as vast and random and ancient as hills.

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extraverts rule. This is really rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.

and the world as I knew it has already ended several times.

I like thinking about complex social relationships which produce and frustrate highly charged emotional relationships.