Words had a way of getting into all sorts of places they weren’t meant to.
Put right the things you can put right today.
A lighthouse is for others; powerless to illuminate the space closest to it.
He bit the narrow end of the flower and sucked the droplet of nectar from its base. ‘You only taste it for a second. But it’s worth it.
He smiled that Frank smile. “Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things.” He laughed, pretending to wipe sweat from his brow. “I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount. That I did a very proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic! No” – his voice became sober – “we always have a choice. All of us.
There was nothing he was going through that the stars had not seen before, somewhere, some time on this earth.
As long as one has good things in the mind, one can be happy. This I know.
Lives gone, traces left.
So many men who had dodged death over there now seemed addicted to its lure.
You could kill a bloke with rules, Tom knew that. And yet sometimes they were what stood between man and savagery, between man and monsters.
Only gradually did he notice she was pretty, and more gradually still that she was probably beautiful.
Life,’ thought Septimus,... ’you could never trust the bastard. What it gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.
No one was quite sure how to treat this mourning that wasn’t for a death.
This focusing outward... painful as it was, saved her from a more intolerable examination.
He is embraced by nature, which is waiting, ultimately, to receive him, to re-organize his atoms into another shape.
Perhaps the same labeling obsession caused cartographers to split this body of water into two oceans, even though it is impossible to touch an exact point at which their currents begin to differ. Splitting. Labeling. Seeking out otherness. Some things don’t change.
Who could blame her for wanting the baby to be alive? His Irene still cried sometimes about young Billy, and it had been twenty years since he’d drowned as a tot. They’d had five more kids since then, but it was never far away, the sadness.
He must return to something solid, because if he didn’t, who knew where his mind or soul could blow away to, like a balloon without ballast.
The line between the ocean and the sky became harder to judge, as the light faltered second by second. The barometer was falling. There would be a storm before morning. Tom checked.
A goblin thought jumps onto her shouder: what’s the point of tomorrow?