Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim. - Salman Rushdie

One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.

Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.

We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.