Again she missed God. She had shared everything with him. From childhood she had gone to him with every question, doubt, delight, and triumph. He had accompanied every advance in her thinking; in action he had been her daily collaborator. But God was gone. This was something she was going to have to work out by herself.
There are few things that cannot be put right by love, and there is no shortage of that here.
Along the borders of this world lie others. There are places you can cross. This is one such place.
What is it that allows human beings to see through each other’s pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, but only the fact that I had come and was a stranger.
He couldn’t go on. He went on.
Joe the storyteller was remembered at the Swan for a long, long time. And though eventually there came a day when the man himself was forgotten, his stories lived on.
If you dazzle a man with green eyes, he’ll be so hypnotized that he won’t notice there is something inside the eyes spying on him.
The laws of life and death, as she had learned them, were incomplete. There was more to life, more to death, than medical science had known.
Was it a miracle? It was as if they had dreamt of a pot of gold and woken to find it on their pillow. As if they had told a tale of a fairy princess and finished it only to find her sitting in a corner of the room, listening.
No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.
An unrested mind is prone to wander into unfruitful avenues; it is nothing that a good night’s sleep cannot cure.
A child is not an empty vessel... to be formed in whatever way the parent thinks fit. They are born with their own hearts and they cannot be made otherwise, no matter what love a man lavishes on them.
They are more real than the books on the shelves, books that are sketched with the barest hint of a line here and there, fading in places to a ghostly nothingness. Why recall the picture now, you must be wondering. The reason I remember it so well is that it seems to be an image of the way I have lived my own life. I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination.
A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page.
Tributaries A river on a map is a simple thing. Our river starts at Trewsbury Mead, and follows a course of some two hundred and thirty-six miles to reach the sea at Shoeburyness. But anyone who takes the trouble to follow its route, whether by boat or on foot, cannot help being aware that, furlong by furlong, singleness of direction is not its most obvious feature. En route the river does not seem particularly intent on reaching its destination. Instead it winds its way.
He would go to the bakery for a cake, and somewhere in the shop-I had never discovered where; it was one of the few secrets I had not fathomed-he kept a candle, which came out on this day every year, was lit, and which I blew out, with as good an impression of happiness as I could muster. Then we ate the cake, with tea, and settled down to quiet digestion and cataloging.
It was like living entirely inside a book.
The events of six months ago seemed very distant now, for on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.
Something happens and then something else happens and then all sorts of other things happen, expected and unexpected, unusual and ordinary.
Pigs were funny creatures. You could almost think they were human the way they looked at you sometimes. Or was the pig remembering something? Yes, she realized, that was it. The pig looked exactly as if she were recollecting some happiness now lost, so that joy remembered was overlaid with present sorrow.