Diary

“Ten years ago I would not have driven into Agen by myself. Not could not. Would not…”

“Brave is a word other people use afterwards. From the inside it was a woman in a cardigan with a cold cup of tea…”

“It works at the scale of a cup of tea and a bird on a dead tree…”

“One colour missing from the whole middle band of the wall is not a crisis of confidence. It is a gap in the wall…”

“There is no case. There is a chapter with an ending that doesn’t work yet…”

“Books do something. Not in a vague way, in an actual measurable sitting-in-a-plastic-chair-on-a-ward way…”

“I looked at her from a hundred yards off and thought, well. She is a whole person. She is entirely fine…”

“The date does not know what I am up to. But I do rather like a day in the year that has been agreed on for setting a thing down…”

“The version of me that has just finished a thing cannot be trusted within a mile of it…”

“I typed a line that I knew was the last line, and I sat there, and the fridge came on. That’s what finishing sounds like…”

“Some houses just need emptying before they’ll let you think in them again…”

“Children see only the mother for a very long time, and then one ordinary evening they catch sight of the person…”

“That first smell of rain on ground that’s been begging for it is the closest thing I know to being forgiven…”

“A new moon is for the things you start quietly, before anyone can see them well enough yet to have an opinion on them…”

“Meditation isn’t emptying your head. It’s just staying. Sitting there while your head does what it does, and not getting up…”

“I think heat like this makes me superstitious. I wouldn’t defend it if pressed…”

“I keep thinking about how easy she makes it sound. Not the writing. The doing…”