It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.
She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is.
Do not equate nationalism with patriotism... Nationalism is the first step on the road to Fascism.
Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.
Moments left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment.
The purpose of Art,” his mother, Sylvie, said – instructed even – “is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.
One’s own life seemed puny against the background of so much history.
The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.
The man who was speaking had a degree in jargon and a doctorate in nonsense.
She felt as if she had been on the outside of happiness her whole life.
Choice, it seemed, was one of the first casualties of war.
He was a baby once, she thought. New and perfect, cradled in his mother’s arms. The mysterious Sylvie. Now he was a feathery husk, ready to blow away. His eyes were half open, milky, like an old dog, and his mouth had grown beaky with the extremity of age, opening and closing, a fish out of water. Bertie could feel a continual tremor running through him, an electrical current, the faint buzz of life. Or death, perhaps. Energy was gathering around him, the air was static with it.
Dear God. When did language and meaning divorce each other and decide to go their separate ways?
As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn’t really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.
It was possible, she thought, that she had won the race to reach the end of civilization. There was no prize. Obviously.
He was part of the infinite. The tree and the rock and the water. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer.
She had been here before. She had never been here before. There was always something just out of sight, just around a corner, something she could never chase down – something that was chasing her down.
The blame generally has to fall somewhere, Miss Armstrong. Women and the Jews tend to be first in line, unfortunately.
Human nature favors the tribal. Tribalism engenders violence. It was ever thus and so it will ever be.
I think I would rather just live my life,” Teddy said, “not make an artifice of it.