In reduced circumstances you have to believe all kinds of things.
Hell we can make for ourselves.
The mind, he reflects, is like a house – thoughts which the owner no longer wishes to display, or those which arouse painful memories, are thrust out of sight, and consigned to attic or cellar; and in forgetting, as in the storage of broken furniture, there is surely an element of will at work.
It was the feet they’d do, for a first offense. They used steel cables, frayed at the ends. After.
She was not stunned, the way I was. In some strange way she was gleeful, as if this was what she had been expecting for some time and now she’d been proven right.
He came to understand why serial killers sent helpful clues to the police.
In God we trust, all others pay cash.
It’s always an advantage to have something to do with your hands. That way, if someone makes an inappropriate remark, you can pretend you haven’t heard it. Then you don’t have to answer.
Watch out for the leaders, Crake used to say. First the leaders and the led, then the tyrants and the slaves, then the massacres. That’s how it’s always gone.
You should always try to imagine what they must be feeling. Of course they will resent you. It is only natural. Try to feel for them. Aunt Lydia thought she was very good at feeling for other people. Try to pity them. Forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you’ve turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie.
For once in their lives, they loved themselves.
This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.
I could spell it,” I say. “Write it down.” He hesitates at this novel idea. Possibly he doesn’t remember I can. I’ve never held a pen or a pencil, in this room, not even to add up the scores. Women can’t add, he once said, jokingly. When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don’t make four. What.
They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
This thing I’m doing can hardly be called living. Instead I’m lying dormant, like a bacterium in a glacier. Getting time over with. That’s all.
As for you, she’d say to me, you’re just a backlash. Flash in the pan. History will absolve me. But.
We would lie in those afternoon beds, afterwards, hands on each other, talking it over. Possible, impossible. What could be done? We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?
There are days when I can hardly make it out of bed. I find it an effort to speak. I measure progress in steps, the next one and the next one, as far as the bathroom. These steps are major accomplishments. I focus on taking the cap off the toothpaste, getting the brush up to my mouth. I have difficulty lifting my arm to do even that. I feel I am without worth, that nothing I can do is of any value, least of all to myself.
Guess it’s the climate change,” says Sam. That’s what people say, the way they used to say, We’ve angered God.