She said to the Daisy girl with her big brown eyes: ‘I will not have it plain. No. Fancy. It must be fancy!’ She meant her future. A moon-daisy dropped to the floor, down from her hair, like a faintly derisive sign from heaven.
Losing their names, these things underwent a process of uncreation.
Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.
He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.
Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with.
Midnight, and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves birthday, the door of the solstice still wide enough open to let them all slink through.
I think I want to be in love with you but I don’t know how.
I should have liked to have had him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.
How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.
Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn.
Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!
Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can’t be ironic all the time.
Home is where the heart is and hence a movable feast.
The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.
It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre – the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list.
Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late Autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart.
Irish was a man of parts even if some of them didn’t work too well.
Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.