There’s ways to survive these times, Doubleclick, and I think one way is the shape the telling takes.
And here was a summer day, asking to be longer. As if a summer’s day wasn’t long enough.
You can’t put a pin through a summer.
Books. Knowledge. Years of reading. All of which means? I know stuff.
The earth is made of it. Green. Moss, algae, lichen, mould. It’s the colour everything was before there were flowers, the colour of the first trees, the trees that didn’t have leaves, had needles instead, the trees that grew in the first hiatus between cold and warm -.
But that’s summer for you. Summer’s like walking down a road just like this one, heading towards both light and dark. Because summer isn’t just a merry tale. Because there’s no merry tale without darkness.
The ideal woman, a kind of faithful slave, who administers without a word of complaint and certainly no payment, who speaks only when spoken to and is a jolly good chap. But a revolution is on the way, all over the country young girls are starting and shaking and if they terrify you they mean to.
Certain white people in particular can look right through young people and also black and mixed race people like we aren’t here.
It feels a little dangerous, to be so close to fairy tale.
That’s what winter is: an exercise remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you.
Real strength was a matter of sensing something alive in you bigger than just your own breathing.
The act of saying I forgive you, it’s like saying you are less than me and I have the moral or superior upper hand.
Who needs a school homework assignment to be trustworthy? Sacha said.
Funny, she says leaning against an unexpected warm place in the stone on the threshold of the church and liking the feel of it on her arm. Like, how we overload summer most out of all the seasons, I mean with our expectations of it.
I don’t care what language the time passes in, the girl says. So long as it passes.
Since Sacha watched that TV show where celebrities dress up in costumes with huge masked heads and sing a song, and a panel and an audience try to guess who’s behind the mask, it has struck Sacha that actually everyone and everything on TV is like someone wearing a mask. After you’ve seen it, you can’t not see it.
Eras end, Paulina said. I’m Romanian. I know. They have to. So that new eras can begin.
Seems the self you get left with on the shore, in the end, is the self that you were when you went.
I suppose the fact that we’re all a lot more accustomed to blatancy these days means that blatancy itself has to get even more blatant, her mother says.
Getting old is pathetic if you use it as an excuse for no longer being responsible.