What I’m saying is that we were all of us struggling to adjust to our new life, and I suppose we all did things back then we later regretted. I was really upset by Ruth’s remark at the time, but it’s pointless now trying to judge her or anyone else for the way they behaved during those early days at the Cottages.
Looking back now, it feels like we spent ages in that steamed-up kitchen after breakfast, or huddled around half-dead fires in the small hours, lost in conversation about our plans for the future.
So identical were their pitiful whimpers, the way their screams gave way to desperate entreaties then returned to screams, that the notion came to me: this was what each of us would go through on our way to death, that these terrible noises were as universal as the crying of newborn babies.
Yeah,” I said. “Gone to Norfolk.
As we got older, we went on talking about the Gallery. If you wanted to praise someone’s work, you’d say: “That’s good enough for the Gallery.” And after we discovered irony, whenever we came across any laughably bad work, we’d go: “Oh yes! Straight to the Gallery with that one!
You notice and absorb so much.
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa.
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki The Overstory by Richard Powers The Farm by Joanne Ramos The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
One can’t be forever dwelling on what might have been.
I have come here to relate something to you, Father.’ ‘Then relate it briefly and concisely. I haven’t all morning to listen to you chatter.
A theoretical chance. Atlas Brookings may make a big thing of it, but it’s less than two percent. That’s all. Their intake of unlifteds is less than two percent.
For they found they became oddly uncomfortable whenever the topic was broached, and before long an understanding had grown between them, in the silent way understandings do between a husband and wife of many years, to avoid the subject as much as possible. I say “as much as possible,” for there appeared at times to be a need – a compulsion, you might say – to which one or the other would have to yield.
The war, ghastly as it was, represented no more than “an awkward window in Man’s evolution” when for a few years our technical progress had run ahead of our organisational capacities.
Tommy thought it possible the guardians had, throughout all our years at Hailsham, timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we’d take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly.
I’d never before seen anything that gave, all at once, so many signals of anger and the wish to destroy. Its.
She told Roy that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul.
We were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we’d take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly.
What this all amounted to was that as I was growing up, long before I’d ever thought to create fictional worlds in prose, I was busily constructing in my mind a richly detailed place called ‘Japan’ – a place to which I in some way belonged, and from which I drew a certain sense of my identity and my confidence.
When I look back to this period, and remember it was less than twenty years from the end of a world war in which the Japanese had been their bitter enemies, I’m amazed by the openness and instinctive generosity with which our family was accepted by this ordinary English community.
It was my wish to re-build my Japan in fiction, to make it safe, so that I could thereafter point to a book and say: ‘Yes, there’s my Japan, inside there.