The SanctuCare women went over and welcomed them and said, “You’re here now, it’s all right,” and the Gilead women started to cry. At the time I thought, Why cry, you should be happy, you got out. But after all that’s happened to me since that day, I understand why. You hold it in, whatever it is, until you can make it through the worst part. Then, once you’re safe, you can cry all the tears you couldn’t waste time crying before.
Live performance had suffered in the sabotage panics of the early twenty-first century – no one during those decades had wanted to form part of a large group at a public event in a dark, easily destructible walled space, or no one with any cool or status.
When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray.
I didn’t want realism anyway: I wanted things to be highly coloured, simple in outline, without ambiguity, which is what most children want when it comes to the stories of their parents. They want a postcard.
Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust, so that they’d stagger and lurch and topple over the verge – The verge of what? we wondered. Was it like a cliff? – and go plunging down in flames, like snowballs made of burning sulphur hurled by the angry hand of God.
I don’t think I’ve ever changed clothes so fast in my life, but once I got the silver dress off and those clothes on I began to feel more like myself.
There has to be an “us” because now there is “them”.
I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There’s a lot that doesn’t bear thinking about.
In a fairy tale I would be one of the two stupid sisters who open the forbidden door and are shocked by the murdered wives, not the third, clever one who keeps to the essentials: presence of mind, foresight, the telling of watertight lies. I told lies but they were not watertight. My mind was not disciplined, as Arthur sometimes pointed out.
He shouldn’t have let himself be caged in here, walled off from freedom. But what does freedom mean any more? And who had caged him and walled him off? He’d done it himself. So many small choices.
I finished my tea. This was the moment, I felt, when I should thank him graciously for his kindness and leave. Otherwise we would have to exchange the stories of our lives and I was too depressed about mine to want to do that.
She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had tended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone – to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.
When you are sad it is best to change the subject.
Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn’t as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor – people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always – or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumour, and rumours are hard to pin down.
Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?
He liked to imagine that if he hadn’t been a minor, and she his teacher and subject to abuse charges, she’d have been gnawing her way through his bedroom walls to sink her avid fingers into his youthful flesh.
The personal is not political, thinks Tony: the personal is military. War is what happens when language fails.
God made them that way but He did not make you that way. He made you different. It’s up to you to set the boundaries.
She would rather see for herself; she doesn’t trust Tobias to interpret; she suspects him of holding things back.
There were the garden shears, the knitting needles; the world is full of weapons if you’re looking for them. I should have paid attention.