But fiction has the unique power of revealing something true.
Above the keyhole the door has a latch. It is pretending to be an authentic old latch. The door is pretending to be an authentic old door. Maybe everything there is isn’t authentic any more. Maybe everything there is is a kind of pretending.
Stop thieving my tragedy.
Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it?
The power of the lie, Daniel said. Always seductive to the powerless.
Friends are always pretty, even when they’re not.
I’m everything that makes everything. I’m everything that unmakes everything. I’m fire. I’m flood. I’m pestilence. I’m the ink, the paper, the grass, the tree, the leaves, the leaf, the greenness in the leaf. I’m the vein in the leaf. I’m the voice that tells no story.
Now what we don’t want is Facts. What we want is bewilderment. What we want is repetition. What we want is repetition.
A man interested in the meaning of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.
But I prefer the windy days, the days that strip me back, blasted, tossed, who knows where, imagine them, purple-red, silver-pink, natural confetti, thin, fragile, easily crushed and blackened, fading already wherever the air’s taken them across the city, the car parks, the streets, the ragged grass verges, dog-ear and adrift on the surfaces of the puddles, flat to the gutter stones, mixing with the litter, their shards of colour circling in the leafy-grimy corners of yards.
Time travel is real, Daniel said. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute.
It is like democracy is a bottle someone can threaten to smash and do a bit of damage with. It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming dialogue. It is the end of dialogue.
You can’t expect to live in the world like the world’s your private myth.
The Daily Telegraph reported next day on how the local authorities were apologizing for not having given enough notice about the film unit’s plans to people who lived in the city, and how public confusion and offence had soon shifted to a mass taking of selfies.
Are we at mercy of technology or is technology at mercy of us?
This story is true and happened once in the future long ago.
He thinks about how, whatever being alive is, with all its pasts and presents and futures, it is most itself in the moments when you surface from a depth of numbness or forgetfulness that you didn’t even know you were at, and break the surface.
Nothing comic isn’t serious.
I don’t know, her mother says. I don’t know much about it. It was quite hard to find out anything. But I’m finding it quite enjoyable, not knowing.
So that is what history is, people and places that disappear, or are beheaded, or get damaged or nearly do, and things and places and people that get tortured and burned and so on. But this does not mean that history is not the unseen things as well.