He turns to her, sunlight in his eyes.
I don’t think clarity is necessarily truth. It’s simplicity, isn’t it?
This was the inheritance she had come back to, the prior life she had run from. She was once more back in a small repeating universe.
He was a man of many doors. Were there other professions he nestled into, even briefly for an hour or two?
Just as no score relies on only one pitch or level of effort from musicians in the orchestra. Sometimes it relies on silence.
The idea of a woman mailing a postcard as part of a promise to two children far away indicated an expansiveness as well as aloneness, a hidden need in her. It signalled two very different states.
There are those destroyed by unfairness and those who are not.
The Darter must have been amazed by such rules and beliefs in a pregnant seventeen-year-old girl who would go on to cordon off the bad habits of his life so efficiently.
It is important to die in holy places. That was one of the secrets of the desert. So Madox walked into a church in Somerset, a place he felt had lost its holiness, and he committed what he believed was a holy act.
People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.
Someone’s war was slashing apart his delicate tapestry of companions. I was Odysseus, I understood the shifting and temporary vetoes of war. But he was a man who made friends with difficulty. He was a man who knew two or three people in his life, and they had turned out now to be the enemy.
Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
She swabbed arms that kept bleeding. She removed so many pieces of shrapnel she felt she’d transported a ton of metal out of the huge body of the human that she was caring for while the army travelled north.
Her face became tougher and leaner, the face Cara-vaggio would meet later. She was thin, mostly from tiredness. She was always hungry and found it a furious exhaustion to feed a patient who couldn’t eat or didn’t want to, watching the bread crumble away, the soup cool, which she desired to swallow fast. She wanted nothing exotic, just bread, meat.
The scale of the laying of mines in Italy and in North Africa cannot be imagined. At the Kismaayo-Afmadu road junction, 260 mines were found. There were 300 at the Omo River Bridge area. On June 30, 1941, South African sappers laid 2,700 Mark 11 mines in Mersa Matruh in one day. Four months later the British cleared Mersa Matruh of 7,806 mines and placed them elsewhere.
We need parents when we’re old too.
But a man dancing close to her? I imagine a response of claustrophobia in her. She thrilled to open space and weather nights, as if she could never be contained or fully revealed there.
There is God only in the desert, he wanted to acknowledge that now. Outside of this there was just trade and power, money and war.
She would sit and read, the book under the waver of light. She would glance now and then down the hall of the villa that had been a war hospital, where she had lived with the other nurses before they had all transferred out gradually, the war moving north, the war almost over. This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.
Small gestures were enough for him. One bullet ended the war.