Quotes from A.P.

Enemy number one was now the disease. It had a presence as solid as that of a person - I think all serious illnesses do.

music, music, records, records, noise to cover silence.

Shape? Does a fog have shape? Does the twilight? Does the onset of darkness?

Where is the pain when your pride is wounded? And why do we say that: wounded? There is no gash, no blood, not even a scratch. Which part of us hurts? The brain cells? The neurons? What, for goodness' sake, what?

nothing more excruciating when you are fighting for your life than to have healthy people round you, squabbling over futilities. Who do you love best, and who most do you want with you? Blithering idiots: it's life itself, can't you see? It's life I love best, and life I want with me. Go hang yourselves, all of you, you're only sapping my strength when most I need it. Leave me in peace and let me grapple.

What's that she's fiddling with when she ought to be listening? I do believe it's a pair of tweezers. She's plucking the hairs off her arms. Off her arms, of all places. Not even legs or face, which is bad enough, but arms. Holy shit, what pathetic geisha behaviour - pain in order to please the male; has no one ever told her she has the right to be hairy if that's the way she's made?

Even the biggest blaze, though, has to start somewhere, with a tiny spark, or arsonists would be out of business.

Sickening, the way the youngest de Vibrey girl, to humour the whim of her kinky old father, is actually riding side-saddle today. Twisted round like a blooming corkscrew. Hymen be blowed, think of what it's doing to her innards, poor wretch, think of the strain on her spine when she goes over the fences.

Obscenity is a function of culture - a function in the mathematical sense, I mean, its value changing with that of the variables on which it depends.

But does time honour things? Sabine would teach me to ask. How? Why? And if it does, ought it to go on doing so? And for how long?)

Love is that as well, I was forgetting: it is taking a huge gamble, staking your all on a single improbable throw, jumping off a cliff and trusting an unknown person to catch you before you hit the ground.

I say sister because we were never too alike, too competitive with one another, ever to bond as friends: like the projecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, our characters, by reason of their similar cuts, could never really lock.

Love is never a problem, he said. Where there is love there is never a problem.

Serena had to cross her legs: in moments of dire amusement her bladder tended to play tricks.

Forewarned is not forearmed, it is foreshadowed.

All eyes turned to look at us' would be a slipshod way of putting it; eyes don't turn anyway, heads do, but as our little group joined the fringe of the assembly, there was a discernible swivelling of attention in our direction.

don't try to minimize what god said