I knew, and it was an illumination - one of those things one has always known, but never understood before - that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too. But I could feel none of this. ... I knew I was moving into a new dimension, further from sanity than I had ever been.

There was a kind of shifting of the balances of my brain, of the way I had been thinking, the same kind of realignment as when, a few days before, words like d…

You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?

It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or…

Hysteria has no place in the mind of the sane or the free.

I wish I wouldn't exist at all.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our one duty is to furnish it well.