The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.
Humans don’t share; we exploit.
Perhaps I wasn’t a child of God at all, but the daughter of a Frenchman.
He had never talked of what he wanted to do, where he was going, he never joined in the aimless conversations that clustered round the idea of something better in another time. He didn’t believe in the future, only the present, and as our future, our years, had turned so relentlessly into identical presents, I understood him more.
When Lot’s wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of salt. Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it’s a poor exchange for losing your self.
Does the body hate itself so much that it seeks release at any cost?
A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates? Since factory farming is tougher on pigs than it is on philosophers I’ll take a chance.
But the rags and the ribbons turn to years and then the years are gone.
The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe – no way to see what’s inside and no guarantee that the effort will be worth the trouble.
Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity.
So the past, because it is the past, is only malleable where once it was flexible.
Walls protect and walls limit.
Could so many straightforward ordinary lives suddenly become men to kill and women to rape?
The wind blew and it didn’t seem important, but tomorrow when the wind blew, it would be important. All the familiar things were getting different meanings.
A sign of the times. But the times has so many signs that if we read them all we’d die of heartbreak.
Whites find it harder to believe in something to believe in.
Over the years I did my best to win a prize; some wish to better the world and still scorn it. But I never succeeded.
Be confident even in your mistakes. In Allah there is no wrong road. There is only the road you must travel.
I took them into the garden and burned them one by one and I thought how easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.
But you are gazing at me the way God gazed at Adam and I am embarrassed by your look of love and possession and pride. I want to go now and cover myself with fig leaves. It’s a sin this not being ready, this not being up to it.
Biology is destiny if you work for the patriarchy.