Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway.
Even the village had too many people for him, he needed an island, a place where he could recreate not the settled farm life of his own father but that of the earliest ones who arrived when there was nothing but forest and no ideologies but the ones they brought with them. When they say Freedom they never quite mean it, what they mean is freedom from interference.
I can’t make sense out of them. The handwriting is my father’s, but changed, more hasty or careless.
You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.
This is the forgotten possibility: he might have gone insane. Crazy, loony. Bushed, the trappers call it when you stay in the forest by yourself too long. And if insane, perhaps not dead: none of the rules would be the same.
My mother was a saver: rubber bands, string, safety pins, jam jars, for her the Depression never ended.
You didn’t even look at it!” I would whine. “Yes, I did, my treasure. It’s very aesthetic.” “I was watching! Your back was turned!” “Who says you need eyes for seeing?
He thinks of Elizabeth, briefly, with detachment. For a moment she’s someone he once knew. He wonders what has become of her. It’s the walks they never took, the fields he could never convince her to enter he regrets now.
Perhaps she’ll only be surprised, and possibly not even that. He anticipates this moment, which he cannot predict, which leaves room for hope and also for disaster.
Women do not usually write novels of the type favoured by men but men are known to write novels of the type favoured by women. Some people find this odd.
He smiles most of the time and has eyes that the naive might think of as candid.
China is not paradise; paradise does not exist. Even the Chinese know it, they must know it, they live there. Like cavemen, they paint not what they see but what they want.
It did make a mess; but then, I don’t think I’ll ever be a very tidy person.
The dark torpedo shapes of the fish are seeing it, sniffing at it, prodding it with their noses. I believe in them the way other people believe in God: I can’t see them but I know they are there.
It’s the turnips in their innocent rows, ordinary, lit from within, the praise lavished on mere tomatoes, the bunches of grapes, painted in all their translucent hues. As if they are worth it.
I stare into the water, it was always a kind of meditation. My brother fished by technique, he outguessed them, but I fished by prayer, listening. Our father who art in heaven Please let the fish be caught. Later when I knew that wouldn’t work, just Please be caught, invocation or hypnosis. He got more fish but I could pretend mine were willing, they had chosen to die and forgiven me in advance.
He said Jesus was a historical figure and God was a superstition, and a superstition was a thing that didn’t exist.
Every breath we inhale comes from nature; kill it and we kill ourselves.
This is a pattern humankind has repeated many times over the course of its history. When there is a crisis, whether real or imagined, culprits – whether real or imagined – must be found and eliminated.
Occasionally I do cry for no reason, as it says you are supposed to. But I can’t believe in my own sadness, I can’t take it seriously. I watch myself crying in the mirror, intrigued by the sight of tears.
You think I didn’t hate their pity, their forced kindness? And knowing that no matter what I did, how virtuous I was, or hardworking, I would never be beautiful. Not like her, the one who merely had to sit there to be adored. You wonder why I stabbed the blue eyes of my dolls with pins and pulled their hair out until they were bald? Life isn’t fair. Why should I be?