It was a patient business, talking comets down to the speed of life.
Oh, I hope I don’t teach. Because look what we did: we saved the zoo animals and the nice children, and we damned the afflicted and the blacks. You know what I do every day in that classroom? I do everything in my power to make sure those poor souls won’t learn the obvious lesson.
Exposing corruption, brandishing truth.
This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.
Perhaps life just turned a person who tried harder into a person who felt they must write it on someone else’s report.
Here was the remainder of ten thousand educations, the bones drifted down to this depth. It was the fossil of one’s country. She ached, because the war had cut the thin cord that bound each child to its ancestors with links made from cross-stitch and calligraphy.
Charlie put his head on one side to watch. The ears of his Batman hood flopped over. He said, “That is the Joker, isn’t it?” “No Charlie. That is the prime minister.” “Is he a goody or a baddy?” I thought to myself. “Half the people think he is a goody and the other half think he is a baddy.” Charlie giggled. “That’s silly,” he said. “That is democracy,” I said. “If you did not have it, you would want it.
Mary had written the names of her thirty-one children on brown luggage labels and looped them through the top buttonholes of their overcoats. Of course the children had exchanged labels with one another the second her back was turned. They were only human, even if they hadn’t yet made the effort to become tall.
Life took longer to reassemble than it did to blow apart, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be lovely, providing that one remembered to go for country walks, and to tune the wireless to music.
Just beyond your sight, life might be moving in ways that were moments away from being revealed to you.
The Thames was cold and it was the colour of the dishwater at the end of the washing up. I remember looking up through it and seeing the light pale brown and far above and wondering if I would sink farther or float up to it. I stayed down for the longest time Osama. I wouldn’t mind drowning but I did float up in the end. Somehow I always seem to.
To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before.
How I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety, and we are free to watch it go. This is the human triumph. This is called, globalisation. A girl like me gets stopped at immigration, but a pound can leap the turnstiles, and dodge the tackles of those big men with their uniform caps, and jump straight into a waiting airport taxi. Where to, sir? Western Civilisation, my good man, and make it snappy.
When you make a man ashamed, you make him dangerous.
Do you remember back when you felt you could actually do something to make the world better?” “You’re talking to the wrong man. I work for central government, remember? Actually doing something is the mistake we’re trained to avoid.
Murder me with bombs you poor lonely sod I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself.
There was less of him now. There was less of them all. Officers and men dragged themselves around in uniforms three sizes too big, new holes punched into every belt, every collar hanging loose. They were a garrison of skinny boys performing a play about soldiers.
The first problem of war was that no one was any good at it yet.
Look, do you believe in the institution of marriage?” “Of course.” “And you accept that such beautiful lightning cannot strike you twice?” “Well yes, I suppose – ” “Then shouldn’t you get a ring on her as soon as possible?
It is good to live like this. Once you are ready to die, you do not suffer so badly from the horror.