All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.
We make our own monsters, then fear them for what they show us about ourselves.
I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.
I thought I would be an organic chemist. I went off to university, and when I couldn’t understand the chemistry lectures I decided that I would be a zoologist, because zoologists seemed like life-loving people.
I think it’s really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that’s very hard to explain to people who really don’t believe in the possibility of invention.
She could marry this man, she knew, and still be captain of her soul.
Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling – until now – had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, but he did not let on about his deafness.
We are alive on the very brink of eternity.
The seamen had whitewashed the smoky ceilings of the ward, and that dear homely smell carried the vividness of thatch and lumpy walls and stew given from the goodness of a stranger’s heart. But that was all there was of comfort, and the salt air had turned from cold to warm in the passing of a life, an afternoon.
For all the things that had happened to her, all the people she had met, the miles of ocean she had covered, she could feel nothing worth writing except: ’an exceedingly grand apartment which I spoil by the excess of irritation and agitation I carry with me everywhere...
Many is the night I have sat by the roaring river the rain never ending them logs so green bubbling and spitting blazing in a rage no rain can staunch.
It was a knife of an idea, a cruel instrument of sacrifice, but also one of great beauty, silvery, curved, dancing with light.
They had sat here, in this very room, their knees almost touching, and there had been a sense of almost breathless discovery, and while they had not become lovers everything was laid out, like a feast, and they were merely arranging the table decorations and putting out the place names, the final little touches, so that when the feast began it would have been a splendid thing, not only satisfying to the baser appetites but to the higher senses.
Descartes said that animals were automata. I have always been certain that it was the threat of torture that stopped him saying the same held true for human beings. Neither I nor Matthew had time for souls. That we were intricate chemical machines never diminished our sense of wonder, our reverence for Vermeer and for Monet, our floating bodies in the salty water, our evanescent joy before the dying of the light.
You’re discussing recreational drugs?” He stood and shut the door and came back looking very serious indeed. I was chastened, as I should have been. “Sorry. What have I never minded about?” “Well, I have truthfully always imagined it was my talent, my gift to introduce my friends to each other. Not one I could ever use for my own happiness, I must say.
Remember, this is the country of the duck-billed platypus. When you are cut off from the rest of the world, things are bound to develop in interesting ways.
A mother can have no secrets in a settler’s hut but she cannot so much as break wind and all her children must hear what she has done but now she were far away from Fifteen Mile Creek and no longer could I guess her life. I were told she took laundry and perhaps she did but I am sure she only did what she must do. She had a mother and father and brothers and sisters but in the end she were a poor widow and she had 7 children and all of them was alarmed and unsettled by their lives.
At the end of the day the fence were still not complete but my family had witnessed my new strength and they I could be the man.
How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?
Then he struck his Lucifer upon his shoes and the dreadful looking hole were thus illuminated it were airless with the sour evidence of mice who have found food and blankets and think themselves in a position to begin a family.
The pain from his arthritis was sewn through the fabric of his day, like a bright needle threaded with dull wire.