It would be good to be full of holes, she says. Then all the things you can’t express would maybe just flow out.
The world is full of people looking for meaning in the shape of a bird not native to this country turning up in this country after all.
Well, the naivety and the vitriol were always there all along, Iris says. The internet’s just made them both more visible. That’s maybe a good thing.
She unfolds the piece of paper in her hands and she reads again the story written on it.
Christmas is probably too bourgeois.
The trees are revealing their structures. There’s the catch of fire in the air. All the souls are out marauding. But there are roses, there are still roses. In the damp and the cold, on a bush that looks done, there’s a wide-open rose, still.
Brave old world.
With a bit of help and a bit of luck, we get to be more than the one thing or the nothing that history’d have us be. We’re only here by the grace and the work of others. I am anyway. Here’s to those others who helped, that’s my prayer when I go to my bed, and may I be such an other to a good many myself.
After this painting they look flat and old-fashioned, as if they’re stale dramas and pretending to be real. This one at least admits the whole thing’s a performance. Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.
Sometimes, he says, we don’t know why people do what they do. But we can only do our best, the best we can do, in response, and try to be as good-humoured as possible while we do it.
It’s on my head, Elisabeth says. That’s where it grows. And my face is also attached to my head.
The fact is, imagine.
Like entering what you think is going to be history and finding endless sad fragility.
Then the three minutes of black and white are over and what’s left is the story of human beings and air, something we hardly ever notice or think about, something we couldn’t live without.
It’s as if that map they gave us is nothing to do with the actual experience of being here, she said.
Fear is one of my belongings. Fear will always be a part of any belonging, anywhere, that I ever do, for the rest of my life. I fought hard, to get here to your country. And the first thing you did when I arrived was hand me a letter saying, “Welcome to a country in which you are not welcome. You are now a designated unwelcome person with whom we will do as we please.
It’s what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters.
A child grows up saying words that the rest of the world tells the child aren’t words. But the child and everybody the child holds dear all know that the words mean, and what the words mean. Listen, that child will be equipped, from the very beginning. For everything, dark and light, heavy and light, that life will bring to that child.
That’s what a public library means: something communal. – Kate Atkinson.
Perhaps the day will come, George thought, when I will listen to my father. For now though, how can I? He’s my father.