“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths.… — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
“But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because… — Zoe Heller Copy Share Image
“All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this… — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it... — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
“Music, together with certain sorts of majestic landscape, had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches… — Zoe Heller Copy Share Image
“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky… — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi - such an abherration in their workaday mendacity - that… — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
Somewhere between sanity and madness lays a fine line, for some it is a tightrope walked daily, a fight for balance to be won… — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
“But that I should have ended up in a place like this seems too custom-made a nightmare to be the work of mere ill… — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
It's hard to resist the magical thinking that the work habits of great writers are the key to their greatness. — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
“...elegance loses its power in the presence of the properly stupid...” — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
“The conclusion of Dowell's narrative offers not a resolution, so much as a plangent confirmation of complexities. While Ford would certainly have agreed with… — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
“I could feel Monika nudging me furiously at this point, but I refused to look at her. I wasn’t feeling particularly reverent about my… — Zoe Heller Copy Share Image
