God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.
A contempt for things, for order, cleanliness, must lie on a spectrum with scorn for laws, values, for life itself. What is a criminal but a disordered spirit?
All day we’ve witnessed each other’s crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?
It’s a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get.
A man newly in love knows what life is.
Either I’ve always spoken to her from the heart in times like this, or I never have and I don’t know what it means.
I’m close to my mother’s heart and know its rhythms and sudden turns. And now! It accelerates at her husband’s voice, and there’s an added sound, a disturbance in the chambers, like the distant rattling of maracas, or gravel shuffled softly in a tin. From down here I’d say it’s a semilunar valve whose cusps are snapping to hard and sticking. Or it could be her teeth.
She had not thought it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her fundamentally and she thought she was immune. No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of their habitual expectations.
There was something fascinating about tall thin men, the way their bones and Adam’s apple lurked so unconcealed beneath the skin, their birdlike faces, their predatory stoop.
Both men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on their friendship, had created, for the moment, an uncomfortable emotional proximity which was best dealt with by their parting without another word.
Loud people, especially loud women, always attract enemies.
She had the power to remove a child from an unkind parent and she sometimes did. But remove herself from an unkind husband? When she was weak and desolate? Where was her protective judge?
The quiet gravity really wasn’t his style at all, which had always been both needy and dour; anxious to be liked, but incapable of taking friendliness for granted. A burden of the hugely rich.
I experienced only the glow of an extraordinary reading experience, a form of profound gratitude familiar to all who love literature.
Memory’s got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.
These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus.
Thus the engine of self-pity began to turn.
Daringly, they touched the tips of their tongues, and it was then she made the falling, sighing sound which, he realised later, marked a transformation. Until that moment, there was still something ludicrious about having a familiar face so close to one’s own. They felt watched by their bemused childhood selves.
Later, while my mother reclines, angry and exhausted, I recede into primal speculation. What kind of being is this? Is big John Cairncross our envoy to the future, the form of a man to end wars, rapine and enslavement and stand equal and caring with the women of the world? Or will he be trampled into oblivion by brutes? We shall find out.
My own small discovery has been that this change is possible, it is within our power. Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we’re going to be at peace with each other, I’m not saying it’ll happen. There’s a good chance it won’t. I’m saying it’s our only chance.