Jasper de Zoet. A damn good name. A ‘J’ and a ‘Z.’ Nice high Scrabble score.
We – by whom I mean anyone over sixty – commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide.
A big fat zoo of snorers is snoring in all different rhythms.
February’s so gloomy in this part of the world”, said Mrs. de Roo, “don’t you think? It’s not so much a month as a twenty-eight day long Monday morning.
Linda shares her packet of Custard Creams with me, and Marion says “Picking is hungry work” in her bunged up voice, and I say, “Yeah, it is, Marion,” and Marion’s really happy, and I wish her life could be easier than it’s going to be.
Are you what you believe yourself to be?
A salaam aleikum.” The elderly Irishwoman has a foamy cloud of white hair and a zigzag cashmere poncho. You wouldn’t cross her.
Aoife, in her dreams, makes a noise like a friendless harmonica.
A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat.
Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods’ consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror.
Why’s it okay to draw spaceships if you’re seven, but not okay to draw diabolical mazes?
Places change you, Miss Timms, and deserts change us pale northerners so much, our own mothers wouldn’t recognize us.
And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better.
I managed to smile, thinking how Modesty is Vanity’s craftier stepbrother.
No organist played a Magnificat but the wind in the flue chimney, no choir sang a Nunc Dimittis but the wuthering gulls, yet I fancy the Creator was not displeazed.
Gardener made a bonfire of fallen leaves – just came in from it. The heat on one’s face and hands, the sad smoke, the crackling and wheezing fire. Reminds me of the groundsman’s hut at Gresham. Anyway, got a gorgeous passage from the fire – percussion for crackling, alto bassoon for the wood, and a restless flute for the flames.
Yet what are we without our addictions? Insipid. Flavourless.
Her professional conscience is a collar. I hold the leash.
Are we mutants? Have we evolved this way? Or are we designed? Designed by whom? Why did the designer go to such elaborate lengths, only to vacate the stage and leave us wondering why we exist? For entertainment? For perversity? For a joke? To judge us? “To what end?
But the paranormal is persuasive; why else does religion persist?