We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship... Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Either everything is sacred or nothing is. And if he starts burning other people’s things, then he loses something sacred also. Everyone gets what’s coming, sooner or later.
But I was so much older then,” sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, “I’m younger than that now.
Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one.
We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn’t afford, the baffling obsession with quiet, the incessant correcting of their original patois or cockney, the sense that they could never do anything right anyway. A.
Great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They’d met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.
We worried for her. We tend to assume the worst, here in Willesden. We watched her watching the shuttlecock. Pock, smash. Pock, smash. As if one player could imagine only a violent conclusion and the other only a hopeful return.
To her credit, though, Trace didn’t lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman’s art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.
I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it. “You.
I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy’s screwy – cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad.
Back then, we were all still willing to take the “risk,” if “risk” is the right word to describe entering into the lives of others, not merely in symbol but in reality.
Did all friendships – all relations – involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power?
At least then, we have the satisfaction of a little short-term pleasure instead of a lifetime of feeling inadequate.
I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it.
It just goes to show,’ said Alsana, revealing her English tongue, “you go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
Faith involves an acceptance of absurdity.
He had not seen her since that afternoon. And with the miracle that is male compartmentalization he had barely thought of her either.
But there have always been these people for whom rap language is more scandalous than the urban deprivation rap describes.
No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods – come and gone with the sun.
You’re next. It’s the next thing. Next stop Kilburn Station. The doors fold inwards, urban insect closing its wings.