Not so. Fold up the maps and put away the globe. If someone else had charted it, let them. Start another drawing with whales at the bottom and cormorants at the top, and in between identify, if you can, the places you have not found yet on those other maps, the connections obvious only to you. Round and flat, only a very little has been discovered.
So light a candle to the dead. And light a candle to miracles, however unlikely, and pray that you recognise yours. And light a candle to the living; the world of friendship and family that means so much. And light a candle to the future; that it may happen and not be swallowed up by darkness. And light a candle to love.
I’m never tempted by God but I like his trappings. Not tempted but I begin to understand why others are. With this feeling inside, with this wild love that threatens, what safe places might there be? Where do you store gunpowder? How do you sleep at night again? If I were a little different I might turn passion into something holy and then I would sleep again.
If you can’t survive in this world, you had better make a world of your own.
Passion is sweeter split strand by strand.
There is the sailor sea and the commercial sea, the oil-well sea and the fishy sea. The sea that tests the land through sublunary power. The rise and fall of the harbour sea and the sea that exists to make maps look prettier. But the functional sea is not the final sea. There is that other sea simply itself.
All time is eternally present and so all time is ours, There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming.
We were in Ireland. Was there ever a country so damp? I had to wring out my mind to think clearly. I was a morning mist of confusion.
If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession.
For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text?
Until we learn to stop dying Tom, we have to live with the consequences. There’s no room for the dead unless you treat them as ornamental.
In this life you have to be your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way.
I hate this hospital. I sat in the car like this after my wife died. Staring out of the windscreen seeing nothing. The whole day passed and then it was night and nothing had changed because everything had changed.
Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame?
Humans have given away all their power to a “they”. You aren’t able to fight the system because without the system none of you can survive. You made a world without alternatives, and now it is dying, and your new world already belongs to “they”.’ ‘I.
What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future.
When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map.
Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.
In the lives of saints I look for confirmation of excess. To them it is not strange to spend nights on a mountain or to forgo food. For them, the visionary and the everyday coincide. Above all, they have no domestic virtues, preferring intensity to comfort. Despite their inhospitable ways, they ferment with unexpected life, like those bleak railway cuttings that host horizontal dandelions. They know there is no passion without pain.
Neither parent spoke. Milo stood between them like a lighthouse between the rocks and the shipwreck.