You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside.
In fact all he can remember of her is that he sent her a postcard he wished afterwards he’d kept for himself.
Well, truth’s like the sun. Look right at it and that’s your eyes ruined for life.
I wished that my own bones were unbound, I wished they were mingling, picked clean by fish, with the bones of another body, a body my bones and heart and soul had loved with unfathomable certainty for decades, and both of us down deep now, lost to everything but the fact of bare bones on a dark seabed.
So always risk your skin, she said, and never fear losing it, cause it always does some good one way or another when the powers that be deign to take it off us.
Imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you’d made, as if the thing you’d made became you.
This isn’t fiction, the man says. This is the Post Office.
The people in this country are in furious rages at each other after the last vote, she said, and the government we’ve got has done nothing to assuage it and instead is using people’s rage for its own political expediency. Which is a grand old fascist trick if ever I saw one, and a very dangerous game to play. And what’s happening in the United States is directly related, and probably financially related.
But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff.
It’s all right to forget, you know, he said. It’s good to. In fact, we have to forget things sometimes. Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we’d never sleep ever again.
Somehow this wasn’t the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren’t relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.
It is perhaps rather fine, after all, being dead. Highly underrated in the modern western world.
There was this different quality to the light even only four days past the shortest day; the shift, the reversal, from increase of darkness to increase of light, revealed that a coming back of light was at the heart of midwinter equally as much as the waning of light.
Mind and matter are mysterious and, when they come together, bounteous.
Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.
When the state is not kind, then the people are fodder.
She had entered him like he was water. Like he was a dictionary and she was a word he hadn’t known was in him. Or she had entered him more simply, like he was a door and she opened him, leaving him standing ajar as she walked straight in.
How very disappointing truth is sometimes.
Words were stories in themselves.
That’s what love is, this matter of hopeful travel against the usual deeply troubling odds.