

“Nothing had changed and yet everything had changed, and it was this invisibility that he found most disturbing, for it depicted by omission all the old freedoms. The vitality hidden in things that may have once got on his nerves had been snuffed out: there were no groups of tourists taking selfies; no men of God yelling fire and brimstone; no demonstrators marching or chaining themselves onto railings; no feverish sounds, or smells of sugared almonds and poisonous hot dogs – unbelievably no smells at all. The loudness of these absences was unendurable; it was all Mr Rubens could do to click his eyes wide open, and cast around for memories that might oppose the deadly dearth.”
― The Coldness of Objects
― The Coldness of Objects

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.”
― Lolita
― Lolita

“she and Lynn must have both become so accustomed to playing their respective parts that they had carried on playing them compulsively, until the very end.”
― Polk, Harper & Who
― Polk, Harper & Who

“It had all to do with keeping intact a thread that was a gateway to the past, with all the love it had contained not lost and remembered but always alive. Life was labyrinthine, but ultimately all its tangles were united.”
― The Coldness of Objects
― The Coldness of Objects

“A tortured man but a marvellous writer, complex and yet also entirely simple. As I always say, one is never too young to be reading Kafka, and never too old to be reading him differently.”
― The Madness of Grief
― The Madness of Grief
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