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Literature encourages resistance to capitalist values, to the practicalities of getting and spending. Literature is the noise of culture as well as its information. It is an entropic force as well cultural capital. It is a writing that calls for a reading and engages readers in problems of meaning.

'Literature' is an instutional label that gives us reason to expect that the results of our reading efforts will be 'worth it'. And many of the features of literature follow from the willingness of readers to pay attention, to explore uncertainties, and not immediately ask 'what do you mean by that?'

Theory is driven by the impossible desire to step outside your own thought, both to place it and to understand it, and also by a desire for change - this is a possible desire- both in the world your thought engages and in the ways of your own thought, which always could be sharper, more knowledgeable and capacious, more self-reflecting.

Theory is a source for constant upstagings: 'What! You haven't read Lacan! How can you talk about the lyric without addressing the specular constitution of the speaking subject? Or 'How can you write about the Victorian novel without using Foucault's account of the deployment of sexuality and the hysterization of women's bodies?'

Yesterday I went for a walk by the sea with a friend and the air was thick with mist and the sea was buffeting and jolting towards the shore in long angry waves. But then the sun came through and we were surrounded by a buttery light, the kind of light that William Blake used for Heaven and its inhabitants.

Le prodige fut que cette grosse fille jouait à la ville des rôles de charmeuse, sans un effort. C'étaient des souplesses de couleuvre, un déshabillé savant, comme involontaire, exquis d'élégance, une distinction nerveuse de chatte de race, une aristocratie du vice, superbe, révoltée, mettant le pied sur Paris, en maîtresse toute-puissante. Elle donnait le ton, de grandes dames l'imitaient.

Nana avait toujours tremblé devant la loi, cette puissance inconnue, cette vengeance des hommes qui pouvaient la supprimer, sans que personne au monde la défendit.

Elle guettait les mieux mis, elle voyait ça à leurs yeux pâles. C'était comme un coup de folie charnelle passant sur la ville. Elle avait un peu peur, car les plus comme il faut étaient les plus sales. Tout le vernis craquait, la bête se montrait, exigeante dans ses goûts monstrueux, raffinant sa perversion.

Tout son être se révoltait, la lente possession dont Nana l'envahissait l'effrayait, en lui rappelant ses lectures de piété, les possessions diaboliques qui avaient bercé son enfance. Il croyait au diable. Nana, confusément était le diable, avec ses rires, avec sa gorge et sa croupe, gonflés de vice.

But how can we hold such a tiny thing against her? Don't we all of us slay each other, day in, day out, hour after hour, with our exquisite smiles and shattering indifference, our lavish displays of wealth that the more impoverished members of society can only lower their eyes before?

How could he fail to be alert to the slightest of her intonations and remarks! When you see someone you love continually weighing in secret, like gleaming copper weights on the pan of a golden scale, on one side her life, on the other her death, and you see her stooping to examine precisely on which side it tips - how can you help but peer over her shoulder?

Hiking around with someone who doesn't look at things as you do is always interesting. Fanny moves through the landscape not in order to read there like the Narrator, but to live. The open sky and the rolling meadows lend themselves to the movement of her thoughts, whereas for the Narrator everything falls still so that he can savor - just savor -down to the tiniest detail - as a happy expanse of untamed countryside.

Perhaps we all have lives the person closest to us knows nothing of? And perhaps this is what really attracts us to each other: the presence of this secret life which, from time to time, is revealed to us through a gleaming, narrow slit. The vision is fleeting and comes as a complete surprise; all our convictions are shaken because, however observant we might be, we hadn’t noticed a thing

I said I wasn't sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting: when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world - whatever its features - was catastrophic.

And there is no better hiding place, he said, than somewhere as close as possible to the truth, something all good liars know.

And there is no better hiding place, he said, than somewhere as close as possible to the truth, something all good liars know.

The men of this nation are the sweetest but also the most childlike. Behind every man is his mother, who made so much fuss of him he will never recover from it, and will never understand why the rest of the world doesn't make the same fuss of him, particularly the woman who has replaced his mother and who he can neither trust nor forgive for replacing her.

I prefer the Hemingway model, he said, though without the guns and the self-abuse, obviously. But the physical perfection - I mean, why not? Why treat your body as if it’s just some carrier bag for your brain?

It may be the case that it is only when it is too late to escape that we see we were free all along.

She preferred being that sylph with the waterfall of hair. In some part of herself, she believed that that was who she still was. A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living.

The pain of losing something precious - be it happiness or material wealth – can be forgotten over time. But our missed opportunities never leave us, and every time they come back to haunt us, we ache. Or perhaps what haunts us is that nagging thought that things might have turned out differently. Because without that thought, we would put it down to fate and accept it.

If a person truly has the ability to love, then he can never monopolize his beloved. And neither can his beloved monopolize him. The more he spreads his love, the more he adores his one and only true love. When love spreads, it does not diminish.

Freedom, I said, is a home you leave once and can never go back to.

The concept of justice he had evolved as a result of these experiences was not retributive but the reverse. He had tried to develop his own capacity for forgiveness in order to be free.

I said a lot of people spent their lives trying to make things last as a way of avoiding asking themselves whether those things were what they really wanted. And maybe people run marathons to exercise their fantasties of running away.

Loneliness, she said, is when nothing will stick to you, when nothing will thrive around you, when you start to think that you kill things just by being there.

It's funny, how when parents do things to their children, it's as if they think no one can see them. It's as if the child is an extension of them: when they talk to it, they're talking to themselves; when they love it, they're loving themselves; when they hate it, it's their own self they're hating. You never know what's coming next, because it's coming out of them not you, even if they blame it on you afterwards.

We examine least what has formed us the most, and instead find ourselves driven blindly to re-enact it. Maybe it is only in our injuries that the future can take root.

I was suddenly filled with the most extraordinary sense of existence as a secret pain, an inner torment it was impossible to share with others, who asked you to attend to them while remaining oblivious to what was inside you, like the mermaid in the fairy story who walks on the knives that on one else can see.

She remembered a piece of music by Olivier Messiaen, written during his internment in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War. Some of it was based, or so she had understood, on the patterns of birdsong he had heard around him while under detention there. It struck her that the man was caged while the birds were free, and that what he had written down was the sound of their freedom.