Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating.
The Hound of the Baskervilles because it is a detective story which means that there are clues and Red Herrings.
Poetry scares her, with its glimpses of the abyss between the slats of the swaying bridge.
What would your mother think about that?” which is stupid because Mother is dead and you can’t say anything to people who are dead and dead people can’t think.
But sometimes it is fun not knowing what the words mean because you can look them up in a dictionary...
And now if I don’t know what someone is saying I ask them what they mean or I walk away.
He can see now that this is a delusion from which you suffer when the path chosen for you is a profitable one. When the path veers into darker, more difficult terrain you finally understand that what you thought was weakness in others is not weakness at all; it is simply the structure of the world.
But you reached a stage where you realized it was a waste of energy trying to change your parents’ minds about anything, ever.
Maybe the answers weren’t important. Maybe it was the asking which mattered. Not taking anything for granted. Maybe that’s what stopped you growing old.
Perhaps the secret was to stop looking for greener grass. Perhaps the secret was to make the best of what you had.
The Dordogne in 1984 was the nadir. Diarrhea, moths like flying hamsters, the blowtorch heat. Awake at three in the morning on a damp and lumpy mattress. Then the storm. Like someone hammering sheets of tin. Lightning so bright it came through the pillow. In the morning sixty, seventy dead frogs turning slowly in the pool. And at the far end something larger and furrier, a cat perhaps, or the Franzetti’s dog, which Katie was poking with a snorkel.
She has grown up as a woman. She has been taught to flatter, to please, to depend, to give way, to make herself small and quiet. She has been told to be soft so that men will always have a means by which they can hurt and control her, that ring through the nose which men call femininity. But she has silently refused to accept these lessons.
He does not understand yet that sometimes the monster is other people, sometimes the monster squats unseen inside one’s own heart, and sometimes the monster is the brute fact of time itself.
Una cosa es interesante porque pensamos en ella, no porque sea nueva.
He no longer believes in the gods. He has heard too many contradictory stories on his travels. Better, surely, that everyone is deluded than that revelation has been so parsimoniously handed out. If he has a religion it is that of grass and rivers, of mountains and of skies that continue beyond the ends even of our longest journeys.
It’s bloody hard telling the truth all the time.
He has never believed in the Fates. You shape your own life, you see the available futures laid out before you and you choose the most advantageous. He can see now that this is a delusion from which you suffer when the path chosen for you is a profitable one. When the path veers into darker, more difficult terrain you finally understand that what you thought was weakness in others is not weakness at all; it is simply the structure of the world.
Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits long you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a very good way of making a living. Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.
The boy with red hair, who loved the picture of the bear, puts on as gruff as a voice as he can and quietly asks the boy holding bird if he can have it. It is as beautiful as the picture of the bear, if not more so. The boy holding the bird looks at him, smelling weakness and need. He turns and hurls the bird as far as he can into the sea. The boy with red hair nods and bites his lip and tries not to cry.
Poate ca rugaciunea nici nu este altceva, atunci cand ceremonialul si teologia sunt lasate departe: o nemiscare sobra, in care omul isi vorbeste, aproape in tacere, siesi.
4. There is an old plastic bag from Asda in the hedge, and a squashed Coca-Cola can with a snail on it, and a long piece of orange string.