Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.
And you and me in the car where we’ve always been, where we’ll always be, this night, this road, even when we’re gone and the road is gone and the city is gone but we’ll be here because everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.
In what way am I any better? She is smug. I am cynical. She is puffed-up. I am punctured. I watch her gamely finding the energy to thrash about on life’s greasy surface, while I lie paralysed, croaking about another life I think I can see.
My own heart, like this wild place, has never been visited, and I do not know whether it could sustain life.
Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question ‘How shall I live?’ is not one I can answer on prescription.
At my most precarious, I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.
Everyone remembers things which never happened. And it is common knowledge that people often forget things which did. Either we are all fantasists and liars or the past has nothing definite in it.
The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.
Reading is a life-long collision with minds not like your own.
Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.
I think therefore I am. Does that mean ‘I feel therefore I’m not’? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.
First there is the forest and inside the forest the clearing and inside the clearing the cabin and inside the cabin the mother and inside the mother the child and inside the child the mountain.
Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually? I dare not ask if you are happy? Are you happy?
She had been a career woman all her life. She noted there was no such thing as a career man. She had made her choices. No regrets, But there were losses. There always were.
But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?
Lonely cries, and she was lonely, not for friends but for a time that hadn’t been violated.
History has had you – and me too. My hand has brushed against yours for centuries.
I like passion, I like to be among the desperate.
There are different sorts of treachery, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. She burnt a lot more than the letters that night in the backyard. I don’t think she knew. In her head she was still queen, but not my queen any more, not the White Queen any more. Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.
I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they’re supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.