If you can’t stop the waves, go sailing.
And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.
But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom now. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.
Men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.
This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.
But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.
I remember adapt,” says Toby. “It was another way of saying tough luck. To people you weren’t going to help out.
These things are not real. They are phantasmagoria. They were made by dreams, and now that no one is dreaming them any longer they are crumbling away.
I’m not going to have a husband anyway,” said Laura. “I’m going to live by myself in the garage.
I was communicating with my inner Pilar, which was externalized in visible form, connected with the help of a brain chemistry facilitator to the wavelengths of the Universe; a universe in which – rightly understood – there are no coincidences.
They seem close, the stars, but they’re far away. Their light is millions, billions of years out of date. Messages with no sender.
He has a vision of the top of his neck, opening up into his head like a bathroom drain. Fragments of words are swirling down it, in a grey liquid he realizes is his dissolving brain.
The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment – the way it always was, Crake would have said – and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate.
His generation believed that if there was trouble all you’d have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay.
Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster spit.
He’s got his cigarette going. He offers her one; this time she takes it. Brief match-flare inside their cupped hands. Red finger-ends.
But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.
This is the kind of touch they like: folk art, archaic, made by women, in their spare time, from things that have no further use. A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.