Invisible worlds, or worlds that are supposed to be invisible interest me. I like to see the effort it takes for some people to make things go smoothly for other people. Don’t misunderstand me; mostly I’m part of the invisible world myself.
He’s only a dog. Yes but he has found me out.
Time was my Medusa. Time was turning me to stone.
One thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn’t happen to everyone.
You are stubborn,’ said Roger Nowell. ‘I am not tame,’ said Alice Nutter.
Uncertainty to me was like Aardvaark to other people. A curious thing I had no notion of, but recongnised through secondhand illustrations.
You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it’s not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?
Our memories change as we do.
There are dreamers and poets and landscape painters with dirty noses and wanderers like me who came here by chance and never left. They are all looking for something, travelling the world and the seven seas but looking for a reason to stay.
It works because the principle of personal space is always the same, whether you’re fending off an elemental or someone’s bad mood. It’s a force field around yourself, and as long as our imagining powers are weak, it’s useful to have something to remind us.
I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out.
It was a dark gift but not a useless one.
When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable.
When we buried my mother, some of the light went out of me, and it seemed proper that I should go and live in a place where all the light shone outwards and none of it was there for us. Pew.
She grew in secret, away from their eyes. Outwardly she was obedient and loving, but inside she was feeding a hunger –.
We get somewhere we couldn’t go otherwise and we profit from the trip, but we can’t stay there, it isn’t our world, and we shouldn’t let that world come crashing down into the one we can inhabit.
And I thought about women. All these books, and how long had it taken for women to write their share, and why were their still so few women poets and novelists, and even fewer who were considered to be important?
There’s a lot of talk about freedom. It’s like the Holy Grail, we grow up hearing about it, it exists, we’re sure of that, and every person has his own idea of where.
We are a lukewarm people and our longing for freedom is our longing for love. If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.
I may not spare you,” I said. “For I would rather spare all those who would come into contact with you, were you to be left alive.