Ice Burns, And It Is Hard To

For My True Thoughts Have Spent More Time In Your Company Than In Anyone Else's, These Last Two Or Three Months, And Where My Thoughts Are, There Am I, In Truth".

A Beautiful Woman, Simone Weil Said, Seeing Herself In The Mirror, Knows "this Is I." An Ugly Woman Knows With Equal Certainty, "this Is Not I." Maud Knew This Neat Division Represented An Over-simplification. The Doll-mask She Saw Had Nothing To Do With Her, Nothing.

Novels Arise Out Of The Shortcomings Of History.

Narration Is As Much A Part Of Human Nature As Breath And The Circulation Of The Blood.... Storytelling Is Intrinsic To Biological Time, Which We Cannot Escape. Life, Pascal Said, Is Like Living In A Prison From Which Every Day Fellow Prisoners Are Taken Away To Be Executed. We Are All, Like Scheherazade, Under Sentence Of Death, And We All Think Of Our Lives As Narratives, With Beginnings, Middles And Ends.

Where Would We Be Without Inhibitions? Theyre Quite Useful Things When You Look At Some Of The Things Humans Do If They Lose Them.