Ninety per cent of the drugs were for him and ten per cent for Natasha, a woman who remained an impenetrable mystery to him during the six months they lived together. The only thing he felt certain about was that she irritated him; but then, who didn’t?
Just before the top of the hill she stopped, breathed deeply, and tried to muster her scattered sense of calm, like a bride checking her veil in the last mirror before the aisle.
Anne came downstairs wearing a white cotton dress almost indistinguishable from the white cotton nightgown she had taken off.
There’s a blast of palpable stupidity that comes from our host, like opening the door of a sauna. The best way to contradict him is to let him speak.
I’ll let you in on a little secret, Garry: everything is history. By the time you notice it, it’s already happened. That famous imposter, “the present,” disappears in the cognitive gap. Mind the gap!
They had never met, but she had come to understand what had driven Victor’s wife to seek refuge in a full set of Snoopy mugs.
If we can’t control our conscious responses, what chance do we have against the influences we haven’t recognized?
Patrick’s own nanny was dead. A friend of his mother’s said she had gone to heaven, but Patrick had been there and knew perfectly well that they had put her in a wooden box and dropped her in a hole. Heaven was the other direction and so the woman was lying, unless it was like sending a parcel.
Observe Everything. Always think for yourself. Never let other people make important decisions for you.
A little Indian guy being sneered at by monsters of English privilege would normally have unleashed the full weight of Anne’s loyalty to underdogs, but this time it was wiped out by Vijay’s enormous desire to be a monster of English privilege himself.
David dropped the hose on the gravel path, thinking how useless to him Eleanor had become. She had been rigid with terror for too long. It was like trying to palpate a patient’s swollen liver when one had already proved that it hurt. She could only be persuaded to relax so often.
He knew that she could not help him unravel the knot of inarticulacy that he carried inside him. Instead, he could feel it tightening, like a promise of suffocation that shadowed every breath he took.
What if memories were just memories, without any consolatory or persecutory power? Would they exist at all, or was it always emotional pressure that summoned images from what was potentially all of experience so far?
I feel on the verge of a great transformation, which may be as simple as becoming interested in other things.
Talking of ‘letting go of a lot of stuff,‘” his father handed the phrase back to Seamus, held by the corner like someone else’s used handkerchief...
She liked the feeling that Maine was basically inhospitable, that it would soon shake out its summer visitors, like a dog on a beach.
Other people knew what they were meant to say, knew what they were meant to mean, and other people still – otherer people – knew what the other people meant when they said it.
Most people either felt regret at staying with someone for too long, or regret at losing them too easily. I manage to feel both ways at the same time about the same object.
It was as if every time she played the ace of spades, it was beaten by a small trump.
The Talking Heads pulsed from every speaker. ‘The centre is missing,’ gasped David Byrne, and Patrick could not help agreeing with him. How did they know exactly what he was feeling? It was spooky.