Engleby

I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.

Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.

One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.

You put your time where your priority is.

My direction? Anywhere. Because one is always nearer by not keeping still.

The end-of-summer winds make people restless.

This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.

And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card.

Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.

One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.

...at such moments of extreme panic and anguish you do manage that trick with time: you are at last free from the illusion that time is linear. In panic, time stops: past, present and future exist as a single overwhelming force. You then, perversely, want time to appear to run forwards because the 'future' is the only place you can see an escape from this intolerable overload of feeling. But at such moments time doesn't move. And if time isn't running, then all events that we think of as past or future are actually happening simultaneously. That is the really terrifying thing. And you are subsumed. You're buried, as beneath an avalanche, by the weight of simultaneous events.

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.

I don't like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.

We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.

I'd become more adept at being with other people; I'd lowered my expectations of them and learned to let my mind drift into neutral when they spoke.

It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.

All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed. Because in addition to that feeling, that disintegration, there was rage. I wanted to break something.

The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.

It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.

Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

She was so beautiful I had to move away.

That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.

They're so attached to their patterns that they've forgotten rule number one of human behavior: there are no patterns. People just do things. There's no such things as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation.

I wonder what it's like to be dead.

My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It’s that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana’s don’t do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that’s different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn’t work. Sorry about that.

Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.