There was a sleek Charrington’s house called the Magpie and Stump. Running ahead of them I took in the scene at a glance and was out again before they could reach the door. “No good!” I cried. “We’ll try the next.” I could see that the alcohol would involve us in a rallentando and I wanted to get as far as possible while the going was good.
(Iris Murdoch, 1954, Under The Net)
“Some situations can’t be unravelled,” said Hugo, “they just have to be dropped. The trouble with you, Jake, is that you want to understand everything sympathetically. It can’t be done. One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on.”
(Iris Murdoch, 1954, Under The Net)
“There’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings,” said Hugo. “All these descriptions are so dramatic.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I said.
”Only,” said Hugo, “that it means that things are falsified from the start. If I say afterwards that I felt such and such, say that I felt ‘apprehensive’ – well, this just isn’t true.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I didn’t feel this,” said Hugo. “I didn’t feel anything of that kind at the time at all. This is just something I say afterwards.”
“But suppose I try hard to be accurate,” I said.
“One can’t be,” said Hugo. “The only hope is to avoid saying it. As soon as I start to describe, I’m done for. Try describing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you “Touch it up?” I suggested.
“It’s deeper than that,” said Hugo. “The language just won’t let you present it as it really was.
“Suppose then,” I said, “that one were offering the description at the time.”
“But don’t you see,” said Hugo, “that just gives the thing away. One couldn’t give such a description at the time without seeing that it was untrue. All one could say at the time would be perhaps something about one’s heart beating. But if one said one was apprehensive this could only be to try to make an impression – it would be for effect, it would be a lie.”
(Iris Murdoch, 1954, Under The Net)
“You should then begin each tale of your travels from the departure, describing Venice as it is, all of it, not omitting anything you remember of it.”
The lake’s surface was barely wrinkled; the copper reflection of the ancient palace of the Sung was shattered into sparkling glints like floating leaves.
”Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
(Italo Calvino, 1972, Invisible Cities)
As the end approaches, wrote Cartaphilus, there are no longer any images from memory – there are only words. Words, words, words taken out of place and mutilated, words from other men – those were the alms left him by the hours and the centuries.
(Jorge Luis Borges, 1949, The Immortal)
“Things may change, ma’am. Things may get better. I used to read a lot of history. All of a sudden, you know, the cruel lord gets overthrown, they hang his body from the tower he used to rule from. Then everybody comes out of hiding.”
”Are you crazy?”
”Some have said so. But still – things may get better.”
He turned and walked down that path, steering around the rambling roses.
(George Dawes Green, 1994, The Caveman’s Valentine)
Of all the things I wanted to say to him, I managed none. I gave him the box of matches, I seem to remember. But possibly that didn’t happen. As I think I’ve said, there are some memories you can’t lean on. You sense the railings of them but you don’t reach out a hand.
(Niall Williams, 2019, This Is Happiness)
A student asked the late David Young, MP, how you get started in the career you want. Young said to him: “Have good ideas.” The student asked: “How do you have good ideas?” Young replied, “Experience.” The student asked “How do you get experience?” Young answered: “Have bad ideas.”
(Philippa Perry, 26th May 2024, I have a dream job and family, but I really want to write novels, The Guardian)
It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so. It dictates to us our emotions, our passions. After eggs and bacon, it says, “Work!” After beefsteak and porter, it says, “Sleep!” After a cup of tea (two spoonfuls for each cup, and don’t let it stand more than three minutes), it says to the brain, “Now, rise, and show your strength. Be eloquent, and deep, and tender; see, with a clear eye, into Nature and into life; spread your white wings of quivering thought, and soar, a god-like spirit, over the whirling world beneath you, up through long lanes of flaming stars to the gates of eternity!”
After hot muffins, it says, “Be dull and soulless, like a beast of the field—a brainless animal, with listless eye, unlit by any ray of fancy, or of hope, or fear, or love, or life.” And after brandy, taken in sufficient quantity, it says, “Now, come, fool, grin and tumble, that your fellow-men may laugh—drivel in folly, and splutter in senseless sounds, and show what a helpless ninny is poor man whose wit and will are drowned, like kittens, side by side, in half an inch of alcohol.”
(Jerome K Jerome, 1889, Three Men In A Boat)
’And if a writer like me writes it down?’
Mad waved his hand and blew a puff of wind. ‘It’s not the same. Your written words are but ash-to-be.’
(James Meek, 2019, To Calais In Ordinary Time)
“You will find men like him in all the world’s religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No-one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor – but they have few followers now.”
(Arthur C. Clarke, 1954, Childhood’s End)
‘I hope you’ve spared no expense. I should like the hearse to be followed by a long string of empty coaches, and I should like the horses to wear tall nodding plumes, and there should be a vast number of mutes with long streamers on their hats. I like the thought of all those empty coaches.’
‘As the cost of the funeral will apparently fall on me and I’m not over-flush just now, I’ve tried to make it as moderate as possible.’
‘But, my dear fellow, in that case, why didn’t you get him a pauper ’s funeral? There would have been something poetic in that. You have an unerring instinct for mediocrity.’
(W. Somerset Maugham, 1915, Of Human Bondage)
‘Why d’you read then?’
‘Partly for pleasure, because it’s a habit and I’m just as uncomfortable if I don’t read as if I don’t smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I’ve got out of the book all that’s any use to me, and I can’t get anything more if I read it a dozen times. You see, it seems to me, one’s like a closed bud, and most of what one reads and does has no effect at all; but there are certain things that have a peculiar significance for one, and they open a petal; and the petals open one by one; and at last the flower is there.’
(W. Somerset Maugham, 1915, Of Human Bondage)
‘It seems a pity you wasted two years in Paris,’ said Hayward.
‘Waste? Look at the movement of that child, look at the pattern which the sun makes on the ground, shining through the trees, look at that sky — why, I should never have seen that sky if I hadn’t been to Paris.’
(W. Somerset Maugham, 1915, Of Human Bondage)
‘There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood. I have nothing but contempt for the people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off. The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he writes or paints, who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art.’
(W. Somerset Maugham, 1915, Of Human Bondage)
‘You rear like a frightened colt, because I use a word to which your Christianity ascribes a deprecatory meaning. You have a hierarchy of values; pleasure is at the bottom of the ladder, and you speak with a little thrill of self-satisfaction of duty, charity and truthfulness. You think pleasure is only of the senses; the wretched slaves who manufactured your morality despised a satisfaction which they had small means of enjoying. You would not be so frightened if I had spoken of happiness instead of pleasure: it sounds less shocking, and your mind wanders from the sty of Epicurus to his garden. But I will speak of pleasure, for I see that men aim at that, and I do not know that they aim at happiness. It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in giving alms he is charitable; if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whisky and soda. I less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.’
‘But have you never known people do things they didn’t want to instead of things they did?’
‘No. You put your question foolishly. What you mean is that people accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure. The objection is as foolish as your manner of putting it. It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the senses; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it. It is a law of creation. If it were possible for men to prefer pain to pleasure the human race would have long since become extinct’
(W. Somerset Maugham, 1915, Of Human Bondage)
We listened to them, but it was clear they’d received too much therapy to know the truth.
(Jeffrey Eugenides, 1993, The Virgin Suicides)
“Me? you want me to keep it?”
“‘Yes,’ Judith said. ‘Or destroy it. As you like. Read it if you like or don’t read it if you like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you don’t know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can’t matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it’s all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they dont even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn’t matter. And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something – a scrap of paper – something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone can’t be is because it never can become was because it can’t ever die or perish…’
(William Faulkner, 1936, Absalom, Absalom!)
Withdrawal from booze and pharmaceuticals is a bit like white-knuckling your way through a rough flight in an electric storm. Unfortunately, there’s another element involved, a type of fear that doesn’t have a name. It’s deep down in the id and produces a sense of anxiety that causes hyperventilation and night sweats. You don’t get to leave your fear on the plane. Your skin becomes your prison, and you take it with you everyplace you go. You walk the floor. You hide your thoughts from others. You eat a half gallon of ice cream in one sitting. You crosshatch the tops of your teeth in your sleep. Every mistake or misdeed or sin in your life, no matter how many times you’ve owned up to it, re-creates itself and takes a fresh bite out of your heart the moment you wake.
That’s why mainline cons say everybody stacks time; it depends on where you stack it, but you stack it just the same.
When the house finally comes down on your head, you conclude that ice cream is a poor surrogate for that old-time full- throttle-and-fuck-it rock and roll, and there’s nothing like four fingers of Jack in a mug filled with shaved ice and a beer on the side or maybe a little weed or a few yellow jackets to really light up the basement.
For those who don’t want to run up their bar tab or put themselves at the mercies of a drug dealer, there’s another recourse. You can go on what is called a dry drunk. You can stoke your anger the moment you open your eyes in the morning and feed it through the day, in the same way that someone incrementally tosses sticks on a controlled fire. Your anger allows you to mentally type up your own menu, with many choices on it. You can become a moralist and a reformer and make the lives of other people miserable. You can scapegoat others and inflame street mobs or highjack religion and wage wars in the name of a holy cause. You can spit in the soup from morning to night and stay as high as a helium balloon in a windstorm without ever breaking a sweat. When a drunk tells you he doesn’t have a problem anymore because he has quit drinking, flee his presence as quickly as possible.
(James Lee Burke, 2012, Creole Belle)
The queues had grown longer outside the Metrodrome. Emerging from the cinema, Inspector Cadover scowled at them as he strode away. Here were people unaware that at their back hurried Time’s wingéd chariot … people giving half an evening to nuzzling nearer to the armed, the arrogant, the amorous lady. And beyond that less than paper-thin illusion what awaited them? Deserts of vast eternity, Cadover told himself.
(Michael Innes, 1949, The Journeying Boy)
‘You think I’m an alcoholic or something?’
‘I think you’re a bundle of nerves. Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms…’
(Ross MacDonald, 1963, The Chill)
What possesses people? Unhappiness, always. Happiness is otherwise occupied. It has an object on which to focus. It has daisies, it has snowdrifts. Unhappiness opens up the void, which then requires filling.
(Zadie Smith, 2023, The Fraud)
“Because the day is nigh,” proclaims Gutalin. “Because the pale horse has been saddled, and the rider has put a foot in the stirrup. And futile are the prayers of the worshippers of Satan. And only those who renounced him shall be saved. Thou of human flesh, whom Satan has seduced, who play with his toys and covet his treasures – I tell thee, thou art blind! Awake fools, before it is too late! Stamp on the devil’s baubles!” Here he comes to an abrupt halt, as if forgetting what comes next. “Can I get a drink in this place?” He asks in a different voice. “Where am I? You know, Red, I got fired again. An agitator, they said. I was telling them, ‘Awake, you’re blind, plunging into the abyss and dragging other blind men behind you!’ They just laughed.
(Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, 1972, Roadside Picnic)
It takes a while for us to realise that our lives have no plot. At first we imagine ourselves into great struggles of darkness and light, heroes in our Levi’s or pajamas, impervious to the gravity that pulls down all others. Later on we contrive scenes in which the world’s events circle like moons about us – like moths about our porch lights. Then at last, painfully, we begin to understand that the world doesn’t even acknowledge our existence. We are the things that happen to us, the people we’ve known, nothing more.
(James Sallis, 1994, Black Hornet)
… and he also spent a good deal of money. But there is this comfort in great affairs, that whatever you spend on yourself can be no more than a trifle. Champagne or ginger-beer are all the same when you stand to win or lose thousands.
(Anthony Trollope, 1875, The Way We Live Now)
‘Bad; of course it is bad,’ he said to a young friend who was working with him on his periodical. ‘Who doubts that? How many very bad things are there that we do! But if we were to attempt to reform all our bad ways at once, we should never do any good thing. I am not strong enough to put the world straight, and I doubt if you are.’
(Anthony Trollope, 1875, The Way We Live Now)
He thought too of the swift gangsterization of this society, which in the last resort must be a product of himself and of the other people who lived in it and had a share in its creation.
(Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, 1967, The Man On The Balcony)
But he didn’t give up that easily.
(A cheap virtue when a person still doesn’t know what to do.)
(Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, 1967, The Man On The Balcony)
“…Neither they nor what happened to them has existed for a long time now, only I know what happened, I’m the only one left who remembers, and what happened seems very blurred to me now, as if one’s memory, like one’s eyes, grew tired as one got older and no longer had the strength to see clearly. There are no glasses that can compensate for a tired memory, my dear.”
(Javier Marías, 1997, A Heart So White)
“Let’s go, boy,” she said. “Dark’s coming on fast.”
It always is.
(James Sallis, 1993, Moth)
A family is a group of strangers with a destructive desire for common nostalgia. We had privileged access to so much of each other ’s life, our early life in particular, but I’m not sure we ever really knew what to do with that. I’m not sure we ever really knew each other, in the end.
(Martin MacInnes, 2023, In Ascension)
It amused me, the way even the most dramatic events snuck up on you, their true significance only apparent in retrospect. There was no single moment of transition; everything happened by degrees, each step seeming logical and reasonable at the time. This was a lesson I was unable to learn, despite a lifetime’s demonstration. The present, regardless of what it entails, almost always comes with an in-built inertia, a resolute, robust banality. When I looked back, I felt an almost overpowering desire to relive certain moments with the recognition they deserved.
(Martin MacInnes, 2023, In Ascension)
And yet this was only part of the time; it wasn’t the whole picture. You have to spend longer with her to get any kind of an idea, Helena said; a week, two weeks, is nothing. Most of the time she’s tired, withdrawn, but perfectly lucid and alert and in control of her thoughts. This was what made it so hard. She could really convince you, and then, days later, you’d catch something stricken in her eyes, and she’s a child again.
(Martin MacInnes, 2023, In Ascension)
“On the other hand -” He shot his cuffs and leaned massively on the table, eyes bulging. Beads of sweat had begun to appear among the big tan freckles of his head “On the other hand, here comes this whole revolutionary concept of electronic data processing, and Frank, let’s face it: this is a newborn baby.”
… Had Frank considered the tremendous effect of the computer on the business life of the future? It was, Bart Pollock could assure him, food for thought.
(Richard Yates, 1961, Revolutionary Road)
For several weeks now I have had the sense of something about to come to an end – that old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air. But different now. Then, during prep school and college, and even afterward when teaching tied my life to the known patterns of the school year, there was both regret and anticipation in it. Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes and failures had been wiped clean by summer. But now it is not an ending and a beginning I can look forward to, but only an ending; and I feel that change in the air without exhilaration, but only a heaviness and unwillingness of spirit. With a little effort I could get profoundly depressed.
(Wallace Stegner, 1971, Angle Of Repose)
You yearned backward a good part of your life, and that produced another sort of Doppler Effect. Even while you paid attention to what you must do today and tomorrow, you heard the receding sound of what you had relinquished.
(Wallace Stegner, 1971, Angle Of Repose)
“… Cruelty and dishonesty – those are two things that I just can’t stand…” “Sometimes a person has to – has to choose between them. I mean, sometimes if you don’t want to be cruel, you have to tell, or act, some lies.”
(Christianna Brand, 1944, Green For Danger)
Curiously, looking down at the dome seemed to bring my childhood nearer. To tell the truth, I’d more or less forgotten it – at my age all you have are the memories of memories.
(JG Ballard, 1963, The Drowned World)
“I don’t like this latest rumor,” she said.
“Too far-fetched? You think there’s no chance a bunch of organisms can eat their way through the toxic event.”
“I think there’s every chance in the world. I don’t doubt for a minute they have these little organisms packaged in cardboard with plastic see-through bubbles, like ballpoint refills. That’s what worries me.” “The very existence of custom-made organisms.”
“The very idea, the very existence, the wondrous ingenuity. On the one hand I definitely admire it. Just to think there are people out there who can conjure such things. A cloud-eating microbe or whatever. There is just no end of surprise. All the amazement that’s left in the world is microscopic. But I can live with that. What scares me is have they thought it through completely?”
“You feel a vague foreboding,” I said.
“I feel they’re working on the superstitious part of my nature. Every advance is worse than the one before because it makes me more scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“The sky, the earth, I don’t know.” “The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.”
“Why is that?” she said.
At three p.m. Steffie was still wearing the protective mask. She walked along the walls, a set of pale green eyes, discerning, alert, secretive. She watched people as if they could not see her watching, as if the mask covered her eyes instead of leaving them exposed. People thought she was playing a game. They winked at her, said hi. I was certain it would take at least another day before she felt safe enough to remove the protective device. She was solemn about warnings, interpreted danger as a state too lacking in detail and precision to be confined to a certain time and place. I knew we would simply have to wait for her to forget the amplified voice, the sirens, the night ride through the woods. In the meantime the mask, setting off her eyes, dramatized her sensitivity to episodes of stress and alarm. It seemed to bring her closer to the real concerns of the world, honed her in its wind.
(Don DeLillo, 1999, White Noise)
“Are you in trouble, Billy? Did you get mixed up with something?”
“No, George. I really don’t know what the hell they want.”
“You need money? Peg said you took a lickin’ today.”
“You’re sure you’re not in trouble?”
“If I was in trouble, I’d be the first to know.”
(William Kennedy, 1978, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game)
“It’s your life,” Martin said, but even as he said it he was adding silently: but not entirely yours. Life hardly goes by ones.
(William Kennedy, 1978, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game)
“You ever look at a thesaurus? One-third of the damn thing is index. That’s the way our lives are. We spend a third of it trying to figure out the other two-thirds”
(James Sallis, 2012, Driven)
But if we take Daniel Dennett’s definition of consciousness as a “trillion mindless robots dancing”, where does the difference lie?
Dan Dennett has been one of my longest-standing inspirations and mentors and the chance over the last few years to argue with him has been a great pleasure. I gave a Ted talk in 2017 and of the 3,000 people in the room – lots of founders and investors and famous people – I was only terrified about Dennett, who I knew was in the audience. And rightly so. At one point in the talk, I described perceptual experiences as a kind of “inner movie”. Afterwards, he said: “Ah, that was all great, apart from the movie. Because: who’s watching the movie?” And that’s a very good criticism. There’s no movie because there is no one watching it.
(Tim Adams, 21 August 2021, ‘Neuroscientist Anil Seth: ‘We risk not understanding the central mystery of life’’, The Guardian)
To discover what we know, we have only to decide what we will not see. My memories might well be false, but they would, after all, do as well as any others. Every day, we reconstruct ourselves out of the salvage of our yesterdays. And a man who has been, even briefly, other men, one who has gone with these men into the shadow – surely he has brought something valuable back from there, surely he must have things to tell us.
(James Sallis, 1997, Death Will Have Your Eyes)
La vie , she’d always say, breaking the back of syntax and common usage, c’est toujours entre. Life is always in between. Life was what happened while you were waiting around for other things to happen. Life was what sprang up in the places you never thought to look. In between.
(James Sallis, 1997, Death Will Have Your Eyes)
But soon I learned that, precise and detailed as my memories were, they were also in some incomprehensible way complete. Once I had gone over a period in my mind, it was set; if I returned to it, there’d be nothing more, just those same memories. There was no depth.
(James Sallis, 1997, Death Will Have Your Eyes)
There was the world of the suburbs, of the railways, of the slums and tenements. Dirt, hunger, overcrowding, the degradation of the worker as a human being, the degradation of women. And there was the world of the mothers’ darlings, of smart students and rich merchants’ sons; the world of impunity, of brazen, insolent vice; of rich men laughing or shrugging off the tears of the poor, the robbed, the insulted, the seduced; the reign of parasites whose only distinction was that they never troubled themselves about anything, never gave anything to the world and left nothing behind them.
(Boris Pasternak, 1957, Doctor Zhivago)
“The original meaning of amateur is someone who cares, who loves…”
(James Sallis, 1992, The Long-legged Fly)
There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.
(Ann Patchett, 2019, The Dutch House)
But it was not easy being a coward. Being a hero was much easier than being a coward. To be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment – when you took out the gun, threw the bomb, pressed the detonator, did away with the tyrant, and with yourself as well. But to be a coward was to embark on a career that lasted a lifetime. You couldn’t ever relax. You had to anticipate the next occasion when you would have to make excuses for yourself, dither, cringe, reacquaint yourself with the taste of rubber boots and the state of your own fallen, abject character. Being a coward required pertinacity, persistence, a refusal to change – which made it, in a way, a kind of courage. He smiled to himself and lit another cigarette. The pleasures of irony had not yet deserted him.
(Julian Barnes, 2916, The Noise Of Time)
To his mind, rudeness and tyranny were closely connected. It had not escaped his attention that Lenin, when dictating his political will and considering possible successors, judged Stalin’s main fault to be ‘rudeness’. And in his own world, he hated to see conductors described admiringly as ‘dictators’. To be rude to an orchestral player who was doing his best was disgraceful. And these tyrants, these emperors of the baton, revelled in such terminology – as if an orchestra could only play well if whipped and derided and humiliated.
(Julian Barnes, 2016, The Noise Of Time)
Fear: what did those who inflicted it know? They knew that it worked, even how it worked, but not what it felt like. ‘The wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep,’ as they say.
(Julian Barnes, 2016, The Noise Of Time)
(Attributed to Vladimir Rubin in author ’s note)
‘ … I’m still reading. I always will, it’s mine.’ ‘And it gives you somewhere nice to go at night. … ’
(A.L. Kennedy, 2007, Day)
Evenings at the theatre. Nights on the town. Weekends in the country. Do you remember? A history with very few of the pages glued together, though each time they played the game, each occasion inspired by some unvoiced disquiet, the recollections were reworked a little as the line between memory and imagination became subtler, or just unimportant.
(Andrew Miller, 2001, Oxygen)
Ignorance is king. Many would not profit from his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges.
(Walter M. Miller Jr, 1959, A Canticle For Leibovitz)
Time is short, Grace said. Prime is short. Good for you. I envy you. All your lives ahead of you like that. You’ve got to use every moment. Because in the blink of an eye it’s past you, and you never get your time again.
Forgive me, Grace, Charlotte said smiling, but I think that’s rubbish. I believe we meet our times with our full and ready selves at whatever ages we are when the times happen to us. That’s what it’s all about.
(Ali Smith, 2020, Summer)
Do you have regrets?
I don’t have regrets as an artist – I’ve always done the best I could. As a human being, my greatest regret is that I did not spend more time with my mother as she got older. I wish I could have one more coffee with her and let her tell me all her stories, for the hundredth time.
Do you still think, as you do in the book: “Something wonderful will happen – maybe tomorrow.”
I always think that…
(Patti Smith, Observer 20/9/2020, interviewed by Kate Kellaway)
Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless.
(Charles Frazier, 2006, Thirteen Moons)
‘Think of the seasons as pieces of the finest, most translucent silk of different colours. Individually they are beautiful, but lay one on top of another, even if just along their edges, and something special is created. That narrow strip of time, when the start of one season overlaps the end of another, is like that.’
(Tan Twan Eng, 2012, The Garden Of Evening Mists)
‘A garden borrows from the earth, the sky, and everything around it, but you borrow from time,’ I said slowly. ‘Your memories are a form of shakkei too. You bring them in to make your life here feel less empty. Like the mountains and the clouds over your garden, you can see them, but they will always be out of reach.’
(Tan Twan Eng, 2012, The Garden Of Evening Mists)
There he is with his heart all set on being a gent. Will he never learn ’tis the mark of a gent, not that hats are lifted to him, but that he lifts his hat to others?
(Jamie O’Neill, 2001, At Swim Two Boys)
‘What are you trying to find?’ Slava demanded.
‘I’m tired of being ignored.’
‘I’m not ignoring you,’ Arkady said, ‘but you already know what happened. I’m more slow-witted; I have to go step by step…’
(Martin Cruz Smith, 1989, Polar Star)
“… By the way, Noah was an asshole, too.”
“Why Noah?” Arkady asked. This was a new indictment.
“He didn’t argue.”
“Noah should have argued?”
Yakov explained, “Abraham argues with God not to kill everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah. Moses pleads with God not to kill worshippers of the golden calf. But God tells Noah to build a boat because He’s going to flood the entire world, and what does Noah say? Not a word.”
“Not a word,” said Bobby, “and saves the minimum. What a bastard.”
(Martin Cruz Smith, 2004, Wolves Eat Dogs)
“No, listen,” I say. “Imagine this. You’re in an old aeroplane, the altimeter reads 5000 meters, you’ve lost a wing, you’re going down like a tumbler pigeon, and on the way you’re going over your schedule: Tomorrow from noon to two … then from two to six… dinner at six… Wouldn’t that be crazy? But that’s just what we’re doing!”
(Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1924, We)
Hiding, oh, hiding! The hidden should hide very well, because I am letting go the leopard.
(Akwaeke Emezi, 2018, Freshwater)
For the next four days Gradus remained fretting in Geneva. The amusing parado Xwith these men of action is that they constantly have to endure long stretches of otiosity that they are unable to fill with anything, lacking as they do the resources of an adventurous mind.
(Vladimir Nabokov, 1962, Pale Fire)
It takes a generation, he says, to reconcile heads and hearts. Englishmen of every shire are wedded to what their nurses told them. They do not like to think too hard, or disturb the plan of the world that exists inside their heads, and they will not accept change unless it puts them in better ease. But new times are coming.
(Hilary Mantel, 2020, The Mirror And The Light)
Till then she is the maiden embowered. She sits in the closed garden, ready to be discovered. She lies under an enchantment, in a thicket of thorns, and waits for someone who has the commitment to hack through.
(Hilary Mantel, 2020, The Mirror And The Light)
Mr Adhikari has a degree in pure mathematics; that alone sets him apart from most school teachers. He thinks differently and discourages all his students from learning by rote that is the basic, dominant and only model of education. Ingest and vomit – that is the order of things; you learn by heart reams and reams, and then regurgitate it all during examinations. Everything – History, Geography, Bengali, English, Science – is dealt with in this one unchanging way. It develops only one faculty, memory, and atrophies everything, most of all thinking. You can see the results of this in the teachers themselves; there is a blankness, something of a ruminant’s absence of thought about them.
(Neel Mukherjee, 2014, The Lives Of Others)
‘He’s a superior sort of journalist – they call them diplomatic correspondents. He gets hold of an idea and then alters the situation to fit the idea.’
(Graham Greene, 1955, The Quiet American)
Last week when I was here with the foreman, waiting to be shown round, a little man came down from his platform. His forearms were as big as Popeye’s, and he grabbed my shoulders in an iron grip.
‘Are you going to work here?’ he said.
‘I think so.’
‘Don’t,’ he said, pulling me away to his station on the conveyor.
‘Look. Do you know how long I’ve been working here? I’ve been working here for fifteen years, and in all those years I’ve been standing in front of this box, stuffing printed matter into that hole, and do you know what?’
‘No.’
‘It never gets full.’
‘Doesn’t it?’
‘Do you understand what I’m saying? It never gets full!’
He held me round the shoulders so tight, it was hard to say anything but: ‘Let go for fuck’s sake.’
Luckily the foreman came up, and the man let go of me, and we moved on.
‘You won’t be working here,’ he said. ‘You’ll be working on the rotary press.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘Don’t mind him. He’s a philosopher.’
‘Right.’
(Per Petterson, 1992, It’s Fine By Me)
I happen to have occasionally entered a church and sat there in peace awhile with the people. I’ve always liked the fact that people can be together in there, without having to talk to one another. If they could chat, they’d instantly start telling each other nonsense, or gossip, they’d start making things up and showing off. But here they sit in pews, each one deep in thought, mentally reviewing what has happened lately and imagining what’s going to happen soon. Like this, they monitor their own lives. Just like everyone else, I would sit in a pew and sink into a sort of semi-conscious state. My thoughts would move idly, as if coming from outside me, from other people’s heads, or maybe from the heads of the wooden angels positioned nearby. Every time, something new occurred to me, something different from if I were doing my thinking at home. In this way the church is a good place.
(Olga Tokarczuk, 2009, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
We were sitting in the orchard under an old apple tree on which the apples were already fruiting. The orgchard was fragrant and soughed in the wind. I had lost my sense of time, and each break between utterances seemed endless. A great gulf of time opened before us. We chattered for whole centuries, talking non-stop about the same thing over and over, now with one pair of lips, now with another, all of us failing to remember that the view we now contesting was the one we had defended earlier on. But in fact we weren’t arguing at all; we were holding a dialogue, a trialogue, like three fauns, another species, half human and half animal. And I realized there were lots of us in the garden and the forest, our faces covered in hair. Strange beasts. And our Bats had settled in the tree and were singing. Their shrill, vibrating voices were jostling microscopic particles of mist, so the Night around us was softly starting to jingle, summoning all the Creatures to nocturnal worship.
(Olga Tokarczuk, 2009, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
It is at Dusk that the most interesting things occur, for that is when simple differences fade away. I could live in everlasting Dusk.
(Olga Tokarczuk, 2009, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
Sometimes, when a Person feels Anger, everything seems simple and obvious. Anger puts things in order and shows you the world in a nutshell; Anger restores the gift of Clarity of Vision, which it’s hard to attain in any other state.
(Olga Tokarczuk, 2009, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
‘Do they expect students not to be anarchists?’ he said. ‘What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organise from the bottom up!’
(Ursula Le Guin, 1974, The Dispossessed)
Just then I saw a fast and agile swarm of Fieldfares. These are Birds that I only ever see in a flock. They move nimbly, like one large piece of living fretwork in the air. I read somewhere that were a Predator to attack them, one of those languid Hawks that hover in the sky like the Holy Spirit, for instance, the Fieldfares will defend themselves. For as a flock they’re capable of fighting, in a very special, perfidious way, and also of taking revenge – they swiftly soar into the air, then in perfect unison they defecate on their oppressor – dozens of white droppings land on the predator ’s lovely wings, soiling them, gluing them together, and coating the feathers in corrosive acid. This forces the Hawk to come to its senses, cease its pursuit and land on the grass in disgust. It may well die of revulsion, so badly polluted are its feathers. It spends the whole day cleaning them, and then the next day too. It doesn’t sleep, it cannot sleep with such dirty wings. It’s sickened by its own overwhelming stink. It’s like a Mouse, like a Frog, like carrion. It can’t remove the hardened excrement with its beak, it’s freezing cold, and now the rainwater can easily pervade it’s glued up feathers to reach its fragile skin. Its own kind, other Hawks shun it too. It seems to them leprous, infected by a vile disease. It’s majesty has been injured. All this is unbearable for the Hawk, and sometimes the Bird will die.
(Olga Tokarczuk, 2009, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead)
He would always be one for whom the return was as important as the voyage out. To go was not enough for him, only half enough; he must come back. In such a tendency was already foreshadowed, perhaps, the nature of the immense exploration he was to undertake into the extremes of the comprehensible. He would most likely not have embarked on that years long enterprise had he not had profound assurance that return was possible, even though he himself might not return; that indeed the very nature of the voyage implied return. You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That, he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more comple Xand more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
(Ursula Le Guin, 1974, The Dispossessed)
‘Peter must be loaded.’
‘Stinking.’ She shrugged. ‘Although it’s never been about the money with him. It’s always been about the work. He insists that his prices are astronomical only because we live in a culture where an object’s price and its inherent value are considered virtually one and the same thing.’
(Nicola Barker, 2007, Darkmans)
Beede? Reading a book about yoga? It made absolutely no sense (this strangely fashioned block simply wouldn’t fit inside the box of traditional shapes Kane had painstakingly carved out for his father).
(Nicola Barker, 2007, Darkmans)
Some people endure unintentionally, sometimes even without wanting to go on. The protagonist of Edmund White’s autobiographical novel The Farewell Symphony looks back on the Aids crisis and the many men he loved, most of whom he knows – or guesses – must be dead by now. He invokes Haydn’s eponymous composition, where “more and more of the musicians get up to leave the stage, blowing out their candles as they go. In the end just one violinist is still playing.” Endurance is an act of survival, be it of a person’s values and politics, their sense of humour, their will to go on or their very existence.
(Emily Chappell, 28 October 2019, Ultrarunning, prison, surviving Aids … the best tales of endurance from Shackleton in the Antarctic to Edmund White on the Aids crisis, Emily Chappell rounds up stories of survival, The Guardian)
‘… But it’s worse’n that. The other side’s got an energy that our side en’t got. Comes from their certainty about being right. If you got that certainty, you’ll be willing to do anything to bring about the end you want. It’s the oldest human problem, Lyra, an’ it’s the difference between good and evil. Evil can be unscrupulous, and good can’t. Evil has nothing to stop it doing what it wants, while good has one hand tied behind its back. To do the things it needs to do to win, it’d have to become evil to do ’em.’
(Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth)
The Inverse
Shake the Inverse’s hand and the exact opposite of your life will flash before your eyes. This can be so overwhelming that the Inverse will not shake your hand unless you ask him to, and sometimes not even then.
A case in point is Businessman. When the Inverse shook Businessman’s hand, Businessman saw himself as having a work and going to life. The experience was so intense that Businessman retired the next day.
(Andrew Kaufman, 2003, All My Friends Are Superheroes)
He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the field and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck a rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arms out wide. ‘I will go mad!’ he announced. ‘Good idea,’ said Ford Prefect, clambering down from the rock on which he had been sitting. Arthur ’s brain somersaulted. His jaw did press-ups. ‘I went mad for a while,’ said Ford, ‘did me no end of good.’
(Douglas Adams, 1982, Life, The Universe And Everything)
…at Mo’s they called eggs “cackleberries,”…
(Lucy Ellmann, 2019, Ducks, Newburyport)
After you were badly beaten, the essential part of you that made you a human being could come loose from the world, as if the self were a small boat and the rope mooring it to the dock slid off its cleats so that the dinghy drifted out helplessly into the middle of the pond; or as if a large vessel, a merchant ship, perhaps, began in the grip of a powerful current to drag its anchor and ran the risk of colliding with other ships or disastrously running aground. He now understood that this loosening was perhaps not only physical but also ethical, that when violence was done to a person, then violence entered the range of what that person – previously peaceable and law-abiding – afterwards included in the spectrum of what was possible. It became an option.
(Salman Rushdie, 2019, Quichotte)
Life had become a series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. One had no story any more. Character, narrative, history, were all dead. Only the flat caricature of the instant remained, and that was what one was judged by. To have lived long enough to witness the replacement of the depth of her chosen world’s culture by its surfaces was a sad thing.
(Salman Rushdie, 2019, Quichotte)
…this made the boy feel ashamed, and from shame to anger was a short step.
(Salman Rushdie, 2019, Quichotte)
The cascades of boasts, assumptions and hopeless pleas depressed her because of the image of herself she saw reflected in these obsessive gazes. Was she so shallow that these non-swimmers thought they could paddle their feet in her waters?
(Salman Rushdie, 2019, Quichotte)
To be a lawyer in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humourless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.
(Salman Rushdie, 2019, Quichotte)
My life might have been very different. If only I’d looked around me, taken in the wider view. If only I’d packed up early enough, as some did, and left the country – the country that I still foolishly thought was the same country to which I had for so many years belonged.
Such regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one more travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.
(Margaret Atwood, 2019, The Testaments)
How can I regain myself? How to shrink back to my normal size, the size of an ordinary woman?
But perhaps it is too late for that. You take the first step, and to save yourself from the consequences, you take the next one. In times like ours, there are only two directions: up or plummet.
(Margaret Atwood, 2019, The Testaments)
… this is how things sometimes happen to humans: a man becomes afraid of something like this, of being shamed in public, and this fear becomes his undoing. For the state of anxiety is a seed-bearing one. Every occasion pollinates it, and with every action, a seed is begotten. When a word is used that might elicit an unhealthy response, and in the presence of other people, he may lose composure and his limbs may quiver. Thus every inch of the way, propelled by the state of his fragile mind, he does things that worsen his situation rather than redeem it. He is punished by his own self, as if engaged in a continuing act of unintended self-flagellation. I have seen it many times.
(Chigozie Obioma, 2019, An Orchestra Of Minorities)
For Whitley’s people, life and hardship and struggle were interchangeable concepts. Man was born in sin and corruption and delivered bloody and terrified from the womb. The devil was more real than God, and the flames of perdition roared right under the plank floor of the church house. The man with the power to shut down a mill or evict a tenant farmer ’s family lived in a white house on the hill. But the enemy was the black man who came ragged and hungry into the poor whites’ domain and asked for part of what the white man had been told was his by birth. When people talk about class war, they’re dead wrong. The war was never between the classes. It was between the have-nots and the have-nots. The people in the house on the hill watched it from afar when they watched it at all.
(James Lee Burke, 2008, Swan Peak)
The People’s Liberation Force probably chose their particular speciality because it was one of the safest; there is, after all, very little danger in planting bombs and then retreating to a safe distance. They apparently never perceived that you cannot help alleviate the plight of the masses by destroying the infrastructure built up painfully slowly for their benefit on what little national wealth remained. But however paradoxical their behaviour, what happened to them was simply according to a general rule that applies to all mankind. This rule is that people always think that if they are very expert at something, that thing must therefore be extremely important. The People’s Liberation Force were expert with explosives, and therefore they thought that what they did was crucial.
(Louis de Bernières, 1990, The War Of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts)
“I lived a huge amount of my career thinking I was going to achieve joy through suffering,” he says, “but all I did was create a habit of suffering. I lived for those beautiful moments of being in the zone during the games, and I told myself they were the result of the ridiculous suffering I went through and the sacrifices I made. So I told myself I had to suffer more, because that was the way I was going to get back into the zone.”
In 2003 “my anxiety was at a peak, and then it paid off, we won the World Cup, so I was like: ‘Bring on the joy!’” It never came.
So Wilkinson just kept punishing himself. “I’d allowed that World Cup to become a defining moment, it gave me the proof I needed that I was doing everything right, so it reinforced this idea that I needed to destroy myself physically and mentally. It took a few years for the pressure to really build. And then it exploded.”
(Andy Bull, 9 September 2019, The Guardian)
She looked from one to the other and back again. She gathered into a bundle of herself, drew up her legs – Dilly had a complicated arrangement with furniture always, and she took a while to settle.
(Kevin Barry, 2019, Night Boat To Tangier)
So I got on the blower to the principal. I gave her an absolute leathering. I said listen now, missus, okay? I’m not saying I’m in charge of uniforms at all. But do ye not realise what ye’re dealing with here? These are very open young people. They’re still being formed. These are young girls fifteen years of age. And the way ye make them go around the place in those horrible old uniforms? Awful shapeless skirts and jumpers, down to their ankles, like sacks on them. Ye’re trying to make these girls deny themselves! And they’re beautiful girls! You know what it is? It’s Catholic fucken hijab!
(Kevin Barry, 2019, Night Boat To Tangier)
People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook. No-one can touch you unless you yourself want them to. You only have to be polite and smile and keep paranoid thoughts at bay …
(Per Petterson, 2003, Out Stealing Horses)
I stood in the centre of the big room, naked, letting the heat strike me from the three points of heat, and I knew, and it was an illumination – one of those things one has always known, but never really understood before – that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too.
(Doris Lessing, 1962, The Golden Notebook)
2nd April 1954
I realized today that I was beginning to withdraw from what Mrs Marks calls my ‘experience’ with her; and because of something she said; she must have known it for some time.
She said: ‘You must remember that the end of an analysis does not mean the end of the experience itself.’
‘You mean, the yeast goes on working?’
She smiled and nodded.
(Doris Lessing, 1962, The Golden Notebook)
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:
‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself – educating your own judgement. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.’
(Doris Lessing, 1962, The Golden Notebook)
With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave – that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn’t like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, her idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed – yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.
(Doris Lessing, 1962, The Golden Notebook)
“Eat him!” Guitar shouted. He swung easily over the double pipes that bordered the lot and began to circle the bird at a distance, holding his head a little to the side to fool the peacock, which was strutting around a powder-blue Buick. It closed its tail and let the tips trail in the gravel. The two men stood still, watching.
“How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?” Milkman asked.
“Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
(Toni Morrison, 1977, Song Of Solomon)
So, observe: the court as he observes it: before a ready canvas, attending to the forms – lay in a dark ground – behind everything, beneath everything brilliant and particular, there is this: a foundation of Seville clay, dug from the ground we’ll be buried in; the dark earth to which we all return. Begin here, and then find the contour, the shadows, and the lights. Let it show through rough, or deepen it, add oil, give it lustre, add calcite to de gloss it; there are the different thicknesses of a folded shadow, of a velvet robe. The painter attends to the gradations, where a pupil meets the inkwell of a man’s eye, where a beard fades out in filaments against the plain dark ground; a smokiness to the edge of things, and under the surface, always, the earth, the dark. Without it only colour, without depth. This is the palette: ochres red and yellow; lead white; charcoal, bone and vegetable blacks. Why pay for fugitive imported pigments? Paint the world as it is, in the colours it is made from.
(Amy Sackville, 2018, Painter To The King)
When all the swags ‘n’ roses were the same, all the houses were the same? How can anything be beautiful or noble or romantic when it’s the same?
(Will Self, 2012, Umbrella)
… when I left her to-day, she put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades, to see if my wings were strong, she said. ‘The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.’
(Kate Chopin, 1899, The Awakening)
The winds have gone and the air of April is still and quiet and warm. In the Airing Court, the big oak is putting out leaves of a green so succulent it brings saliva into my mouth. I do not precisely wish to eat these leaves but yet want to possess them in some way before the newness of them vanishes.
(Rose Tremain, 1989, Restoration)
‘As I foresaw,’ said the King at the conclusion of the set, ‘you have become slow.’
‘I know, Sir …’ I mumbled.
‘Very slow. And the game, of course, is a fast one.’
(Rose Tremain, 1989, Restoration)
There’s a boundary line: on one side are those who make books, on the other those who read them. I want to remain one of those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading ends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want.
(Italo Calvini, 1980, If On A Winter ’s Night A Traveller)
The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor ’s gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me “to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.” I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them.
(Jonathan Swift, 1726, Gulliver’s Travels)
He asked me, “what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another?” I answered “they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in a war, in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire; what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or gray; and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.
“Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretend to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrels with another for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war is entered upon, because the enemy is too strong; and sometimes, because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have the things which we want, and we both fight, till they take ours, or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable cause of a war, to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence, or embroiled by factions among themselves. It is justifiable to enter into war against our nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a territory of land, that would render our dominions round and complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death, and make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous way of living. It is a very kingly, honourable, and frequent practice, when one prince desires the assistance of another, to secure him against an invasion, that the assistant, when he has driven out the invader, should seize on the dominions himself, and kill, imprison, or banish, the prince he came to relieve. Alliance by blood, or marriage, is a frequent cause of war between princes; and the nearer the kindred is, the greater their disposition to quarrel; poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance. For these reasons, the trade of a soldier is held the most honourable of all others; because a soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill, in cold blood, as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.
(Jonathan Swift, 1726, Gulliver’s Travels)
I asked how she felt. We drove almost three miles before she answered. Taciturny and distance are linked. It’s easier to be silent when you have a long way to go.
(Henning Mankell, 2006, Italian Shoes)
She moved to snuggle up against me. The warmth from her body enveloped me, and filled what had long seemed to be nothing but a pointless shell. That was how we had always lain when we slept together. I used to carry her into slumber on my back.
(Henning Mankell, 2006, Italian Shoes)
He told me that it had not been his intention to leave me stranded here. In fact, it was his hope that I would seek out a larger life than this. He and Edward both felt strongly what excellent use I could make of a broader experience. He told me that looking back on Gilead from any distance made it seem a relic, an archaism. When I mentioned the history we had here, he laughed and said, ‘Old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago.’ And that irritated me. He said, ‘Just look at this place. Every time a tree gets to a decent size, the wind comes along and breaks it.’ He was expounding the wonders of the larger world, and I was resolving in my heart never to risk the experience of them. He said, ‘I have become aware that we here lived within the limits of notions that were very old and even very local. I want you to understand that you do not have to be loyal to them.’
(Marilynne Robinson, 2004, Gilead)
…There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word ‘just.’ I almost wish I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened, and the water just poured off of it and the girl just laughed – when it’s used that way it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it, and also a particular pitch of the voice. People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness, at any rate something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree. So it seems to me at the moment. There is something real signified by that word ‘just’ that proper language won’t acknowledge. It’s a little like the German ge-. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.
(Marilynne Robinson, 2004, Gilead)
For I am – or I was – one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all – a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named – but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.
(James Baldwin, 1956, Giovanni’s Room)
You’re beginning to sound like Dr. Pangloss, Ferguson said to her one night. Everything always happens for the best – in this, the best of all possible worlds.
No, not at all, Amy said. Pangloss is an idiot optimist, and I’m an intelligent pessimist, meaning a pessimist who has occasional flashes of optimism. Nearly everything happens for the worst, but not always, you see, nothing is ever always, but I’m always expecting the worst, and when the worst doesn’t happen, I get so excited I begin to sound like an optimist. I could have lost you Archie, and then I didn’t. That’s all I can think about anymore – how happy I am that I didn’t.
(Paul Auster, 2017, 4 3 2 1)
It was in March, I think, one of those blustery, Dutch days with china-blue sky and tumbling, cinders clouds. The trees above me swayed and groaned in the wind. Suddenly there was a great quick rushing noise, and the air darkened, and something like a bird’s vast wing crashed down around me, thrashing and whipping. It was a branch that had fallen. I was not hurt, yet I could not move, and stood as if stunned, aghast and shaking. The force and swiftness of the thing had appalled me. It was not fright I felt, but a profound sense of shock at how little my presence had mattered. I might have been no more than a flaw in the air. Ground, branch, wind, sky, world, all these were the precise and necessary co-ordinates of the event. Only I was misplaced, only I had no part to play. And nothing cared. If I had been killed I would have fallen there, face down in the dead leaves, and the day would have gone on as before, as if nothing had happened. For what would have happened would have been nothing, or nothing extraordinary, anyway. Adjustments would have been made. Things would have had to squirm out from under me. A stray ant, perhaps, would explore the bloody chamber of my ear. But the light would have been the same, and the wind would have blown as it had blown, and time’s arrow would not have faltered for an instant in its flight. I was amazed. I never forgot that moment. And now another branch was about to fall, I could hear that same rushing noise above me, and feel that same dark wing descending.
(John Banville, 1989, The Book Of Evidence)
… he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.
(Edith Wharton, 1920, The Age Of Innocence)
‘I am always about to act positively,’ Le Mesurier answered wryly. ‘There is some purpose in me, if only I can hit upon it. But my whole life has been an investigation, shall we say, of ways. For that reason I will not give you my history. It is too fragmentary; you would be made dizzy. And this colony is fatal to anyone of my bent. There are such prospects. How can I make a fortune from merino sheep, when at the same time there is a dream of gold, or of some inland sea floating with tropical birds? Then, sometimes, it seems that all these faults and hesitations, all the worst evil in me is gathering itself together into a solid core, and that I shall bring forth something of great beauty. This I call my oyster delusion.’
(Patrick White, 1957, Voss)
– The rise and fall of currencies, of stock exchange prices, of imports and exports, of the supply of labour and the cost of raw materials –
– Of pig-iron. –
– Yes, pig-iron. –
– Ah, I see you do believe in something – you are one of those whose Baal is development –
– What d’you mean ‘Baal’? –
– Because you’re a pagan, you have to invest some concrete object – a thing – with power outside yourself –
(Nadine Gordimer, 1974, The Conservationist)
…and what he did not say was that he had come to that point in a parent’s life when, if a flood arrives, one knows one must let go of one’s child, contrary to all the instincts one had when one was younger, because holding on can no longer offer the child protection, it can only pull the child down, and threaten them with drowning, for the child is now stronger than the parent, and the circumstances are such that the utmost strength is required…
(Mohsin Hamid, 2017, Exit West)
“I am in favour of a forward movement!” cried one. “An advance to the front is only retarded by the imbecility of commanders,” said another, parroting a recent speech in Congress.
In “Reveille in Washington, 1860-1865,” by Margaret Leech.
This, it occurred to me, was the undisciplined human community that, fired by its dull collective wit, now drove the armed nation towards it knew-not-what sort of epic martial cataclysm: a massive flailing organism with all the rectitude and foresight of an untrained puppy.
In the private letters of Albert Sloane.
(George Saunders, 2017, Lincoln In The Bardo)
I felt settled and easy, my chest free and my fingers comfortable and open. And now here’s the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle, terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavating and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself, you labor , you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.
(Saul Bellow, 1953, The Adventures Of Augie March)
But I was, as at the Renlings’, under an influence and not the carrier of it. I had to get around; I had a figure to cut, the car to drive, the money to spend, the clothes to wear, and served before I had it clear whether I wanted or liked the doing of it all. Even if her father stole in on us at two in the morning as we were loving-up, he stole through a mansion, and it was hard to think him wrong when the lights went on and he prowled peevish towards us. I suppose I saw nothing very wrong anywhere, and it took me longer than it should have taken to discover that he didn’t like me, because everything flashed so, all was rich, was heavy, velvet, lepidopterous.
(Saul Bellow, 1953, The Adventures Of Augie March)
Ailinn drove so fast he had to close his eyes.
‘Anyone would think Ahab’s tailing us,’ he said.
‘Ahab is tailing us,’ she told him. ‘Ahab’s always tailing us. That’s what Ahab does.’
(Howard Jacobson, 2014, J)
The new economic system which has taken the place of the old is even more incomprehensible to them. The laborious and painful rise must start anew. It will probably be several generations before the people manage to understand the new state of affairs, which they themselves created by the Revolution. Until then, however, a democratic form of government is impossible, and the amount of individual freedom which may be accorded is even less than in other countries.
Until then, our leaders are obligated to govern as though in empty space. Measured by classical liberal standards, this is not a pleasant spectacle. Yet all the horror, hypocrisy and degradation which leap to the eye are merely the visible and inevitable expression of the law described above. Woe to the fool and the aesthete who only ask how and not why. But woe also unto the opposition in a period of relative immaturity of the masses, such as this. In periods of maturity it is the duty and the function of the opposition to appeal to the masses.
In periods of mental immaturity, only demagogues invoke the ‘higher judgment of the people’. In such situations the opposition has two alternatives: to seize the power by a coup d’état, without being able to count on the support of the masses or in mute despair to throw themselves out of the swing – ‘to die in silence’.
There is a third choice which is no less consistent, and which in our country has been developed into a system: the denial and suppression of one’s own conviction when there is no prospect of materializing it. As the only moral criterion which we recognize is that of social utility, the public disavowal of one’s conviction in order to remain in the Party’s ranks is obviously more honourable than the quixotism of carrying on a hopeless struggle.
(Arthur Koestler, 1940, Darkness At Noon)
It came back to me the long day I sat watching my mother die. As she talked and haivered I felt the waters rising in her brain. The fields of her memory disappeared one by one, boundaries and divisions crumbled as she talked and slept then woke and talked more, and all the while the waters kept rising.
(Andrew Greig, 1999, When They Lay Bare)
Maybe you still can’t understand why I stayed so long. I’ve nearly finished with my side of the story, and still I feel your small round eyes looking down on me. I wonder what you’ll name my sin: Complicity? Loyalty? Stupefaction? How can you tell the difference? Is my sin a failure of virtue, or of competence? I knew Rome was burning, but I had just enough water to scrub the floor, so I did what I could.
(Barbara Kingsolver, 1998, The Poisonwood Bible)
There’s a particular state of mind that goes on with touring, where you are repeating the same day over and over again. But it’s a tedium I actually enjoy. You’re just told what to do all the time: when to eat, when to get up, when to do a fucking interview – it’s all on a piece of paper. And if you don’t do what’s on the piece of paper, someone very quickly will force you back into line. So it’s probably not dissimilar to prison, but at the same time, your mind wanders and that allows for a kind of free-thinking.
(Nick Cave interviewed by Tim Lewis, The Guardian, 7 June 2015)
… if I am not mistaken, we are being approached by a man who bears on his head Mambrino’s helmet, about which I swore that vow.’
‘Just be careful what you’re saying, and even more careful what you’re doing,’ said Sancho. ‘All I hope is that it isn’t some more fulling-hammers to finish off the job of pounding and beating us senseless.’
‘The devil take you for your perversity!’ replied Don Quixote. ‘What has a helmet to do with fulling-hammers?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ replied Sancho, ‘but by my faith, if I was allowed to talk as much as I used to, maybe I’d say that which would make you see how wrong you are.’
‘How can I be wrong, you doubting Thomas?’ said Don Quixote. ‘Tell me, do you not see that knight coming towards us, upon a dapple-grey steed, wearing a helmet of gold?’
‘All I can make out,’ replied Sancho, ‘is a bloke on a donkey, brown like mine, with something shiny on his head.’
‘Well, that is Mambrino’s helmet,’ said Don Quixote. ‘Move aside and leave me alone with him: you will soon see how, without uttering a single word, so as to save time, I bring this adventure to a happy conclusion, and the helmet that I have so desired becomes mine.’
‘I’ll move aside all right,’ replied Sancho. ‘But I’ll say it once again – pray God this is what you say it is, and not more fulling-mills.’
(Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, 1604, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha)
Gentlefolks in general have a very awkward rock ahead in life – the rock ahead of their own idleness. Their lives being, for the most part, passed in looking about them for something to do, it is curious to see – especially when their tastes are of what is called the intellectual sort – how often they drift blindfold into some nasty pursuit. Nine times out of ten they take to torturing something, or to spoiling something – and they firmly believe they are improving their minds, when the plain truth is, they are only making a mess in the house. I have seen them (ladies, I am sorry to say, as well as gentlemen) go out, day after day, for example, with empty pill-boxes, and catch newts, and beetles, and spiders, and frogs, and come home and stick pins through the miserable wretches, or cut them up, without a pang of remorse, into little pieces. You see my young master, or my young mistress, poring over one of their spiders’ insides with a magnifying-glass; or you meet one of their frogs walking downstairs without his head – and when you wonder what this cruel nastiness means, you are told that it means a taste in my young master or my young mistress for natural history. Sometimes, again, you see them occupied for hours together in spoiling a pretty flower with pointed instruments, out of a stupid curiosity to know what the flower is made of. Is its colour any prettier, or its scent any sweeter, when you do know? But there! the poor souls must get through the time, you see – they must get through the time. You dabbled in nasty mud, and made pies, when you were a child; and you dabble in nasty science, and dissect spiders, and spoil flowers, when you grow up. In the one case and in the other, the secret of it is, that you have got nothing to think of in your poor empty head, and nothing to do with your poor idle hands. And so it ends in your spoiling canvas with paints, and making a smell in the house; or in keeping tadpoles in a glass box full of dirty water, and turning everybody’s stomach in the house; or in chipping off bits of stone here, there, and everywhere, and dropping grit into all the victuals in the house; or in staining your fingers in the pursuit of photography, and doing justice without mercy on everybody’s face in the house. It often falls heavy enough, no doubt, on people who are really obliged to get their living, to be forced to work for the clothes that cover them, the roof that shelters them, and the food that keeps them going. But compare the hardest day’s work you ever did with the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into spiders’ stomachs, and thank your stars that your head has got something it must think of, and your hands something that they must do.
(Wilkie Collins, 1868, The Moonstone)
‘Now,’ he said, ‘now we’re away, now we’re clear, we’re clean gone, Tenar. Do you feel it?’
She did feel it. A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.
What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveller may never reach the end of it.
Ged let her cry, and said no word of comfort; nor when she was done with tears and sat looking back towards the low blue land of Atuan, did he speak. His face was stern and alert, as if he were alone; he saw to the sail and steering, quick and silent, looking always ahead.
(Ursula Le Guin, 1972, The Tombs of Atuan)
“I said, ‘Brother, you have to ask yourself two questions, Who am I? And how may I become myself?’ That’s basic person- centered therapeutics. You want the client to feel important, to feel that he or she is in control of the healing process. Remember that shit.”
(Paul Beatty, 2016, The Sellout)
“Early November. It is nine o’clock. The titmice are crashing against the windowpanes. Sometimes they fly unsteadily off after the collision, at other times they fall to the ground and lie floundering in the fresh snow before they get back on the wing. I do not know what I have that they want. I look out of the window across the fields to the woods. There is a reddish light above the trees towards the lake. The wind is getting up. I can see the shape of the wind on the water.”
(Per Petterson, 2002, In the Wake)
Jinot watched a mope-faced man take up a metal bar and lay it on the anvil. While he held it in place another man scored it with hammer and cold chisel, and broke the bar. “Them patterns is the start, they make up into axes,” said Dogg. “A man – if he’s any good – makes eight axes a day. If he’s no good he can make ten or twelve.”
(Annie Proulx, 2016, Barkskins)
All persons are now plain ‘Citizen’ or ‘Citizeness’. The Place Louis XV will become the Place de la Révolution, and the scientific beheading machine will be set up there; it will become known as the ‘guillotine’, in tribute to Dr Guillotin the noted public-health expert.
(Hilary Mantel, 1992, A Place of Greater Safety)
‘It will never happen,’ Perrin said. ‘What interests me more is Lafayette’s proposal for an investigation into tax frauds.’
‘And shady underhand speculation,’ d’Anton said.
‘The dirty workings of the market as a whole.’
‘Always this vehemence,’ Perrin said, ‘among people who don’t hold bonds and wish they did.’
(Hilary Mantel, 1992, A Place of Greater Safety)
That was the way they spoke, more or less, the men who ran the National Party and the security state, and for a long time he thought they spoke from the heart. But not any more. Their talk of saving civilization, he now tends to think, has never been anything but a bluff. Behind a smokescreen of patriotism they are at this very moment sitting and calculating how long they can keep the show running
(the mines, the factories) before they will need to pack their bags, shred any incriminating documents, and fly off to Zürich or Monaco or San Diego, where under the cover of holding companies with names like Algro Trading or Handfast Securities they years ago bought themselves villas and apartments as insurance against the day of reckoning (dies irae, dies illa).
(JM Coetzee, 2009, Summertime)
I shall respect the laws of evidence. Of truth, whatever that may be. But truth is tied to words, to print, to the testimony of the page. Moments shower away; the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality. Pierre on the field of battle, the Bennet girls at their sewing, Tess on the threshing machine – all these are nailed down for ever, on the page and in a million heads. What happened to me on Charmouth beach in 1920, on the other hand, is thistledown. And when you and I talk about history we don’t mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
(Penelope Lively, 1987, Moon Tiger)
‘You don’t want to sit with me, it distresses you to see a man spend money at Rusalochka’s. You tell me that in the villages the peasants have been taking the thatch off their roofs this winter to feed their cattle, and no doubt that’s true. But in Russia who is happy?’
‘No, no, you’re wrong,’ said Selwyn mildly, ‘I don’t criticise what you’re doing. How can I criticise a life I don’t understand? And surely you are happy.’
‘It’s true, it’s true. When I die, God will say to me, well I gave you a life on earth, Arkady Filippovich, and what’s more, a life in Russia. Did you enjoy it? And if not, why have you wasted your time?’
(Penelope Fitzgerald, 1988, The Beginning of Spring)
He felt sorry for her.
‘Wasn’t it quite what you expected?’ he asked.
‘There shouldn’t be such a state of mind as expectation,’ interrupted Mrs Graham. ‘One gets too dependent on the future.’
(Penelope Fitzgerald, 1988, The Beginning of Spring)
The rising of the spring stirred a serious, mystical excitement in him, and made him forgetful of her. He would pick up eggshells, a bird’s wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp’s nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention, and then put them in his pockets, where he kept his jack-knife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses. At such times he was as forgetful of her as he was of his suspenders and his Methodism, but all the same it was then that she loved him best, as a soul all unaccompanied, like her own.
(Marilynne Robinson, 1980, Housekeeping)
… I am almost tempted to say: “show me a man who over-elaborates and I will show you a great man!“ what is called their “over-elaboration” is my meat: it is the sign of struggle, it is struggle itself with all the fibers clinging to it, the very aura and ambience of the discordant spirit. And when you show me a man who expresses himself perfectly I will not say that he is not great, but I will say that I am unattracted …. I miss the cloying qualities ….
(Henry Miller, 1934, Tropic of Cancer)
“Yes Sir, I’m going to stay with the youngsters. When they get too old I’m going to get some younger ones. Keeps the mind active.”
(Art Blakey, Obituary in The Observer, 21.10.1991)
The toreador ’s provocative flings, the medieval horseman’s floating flag of attack, a sail unfurled in full collison with the wind, the warrior ’s shield for his face in battle, all these she experienced when she placed a cape around her shoulder.
A spread out cape was the bed of nomads, a cape unfurled was the flag of adventure.
Now she was dressed in a costume most appropriate to flights, battles, tournaments.
The curtain of the night’s defencelessness was rising to expose a personage prepared.
Prepared said the mirror, prepared said the shoes, prepared said the cape. She stood contemplating herself arrayed for no peaceful or trusting encounter with life.
(Anaïs Nin, 1954, A Spy in the House of Love)
In the eaves of the lunatic asylum were birds who whistled the coming in of spring. A madman, howling like a dog from the top room, could not disturb them, and their tunes did not stop when he thrust his hands through the bars of the window near their nests and clawed the sky. A fresh smell blew with the winds around the white building and its grounds. The asylum trees waved green hands over the wall to the world outside.
In the gardens the patients sat and looked up at the sun or upon the flowers or upon nothing, or walked sedately along the paths, hearing the gravel crunch beneath their feet with a hard, sensible sound. Children in print dresses might be expected to play, not noisily, upon the lawns. The building too had a sweet expression, as though it knew only the kind things of life and the polite emotions. In a middle room sat a child who had cut off his double thumb with a scissors.
A little way off the main path leading from house to gate, a girl, lifting her arms, beckoned to the birds. She enticed the sparrows with little ovements of her fingers, but to no avail. ‘It must be spring,’ she said. The sparrows sang exultantly, and then stopped.
The howling in the top room began again. The madman’s face was pressed close to the bars of the window. Opening his mouth wide, he bayed up at the sun, listening to the inflections of his voice with a remorseless concentration. with his unseeing eyes fixed on the green garden, he heard the revolution of the years as they moved softly back. Now there was no garden. Under the sun the iron bars melted. Like a flower, a new room pulsed and opened.
(Dylan Thomas, 1936, The Mouse and the Woman)
… I am suddenly aware of the lives potential in me which are wasting themselves. It is a fancy of mine that each of us contains many lives, potential lives. They are laid up inside us, shall we say, like so many rows of shining metals – railway lines. Riding along one set toward the terminus, we can be aware of those other lines, alongside us, on which we might have travelled – on which we might yet travel if only we had the strength to change.
(Lawrence Durrell, 1938, The Black Book)
‘Retreat from what? From whom?’ I recall him demanding with characteristic heat. ‘From the people and their basic needs of water which is free from Guinea worm, of simple shelter and food. That’s what you are retreating from. You retreat up the hill and commune with your cronies and forget the very people who legitimize your authority.’
‘Don’t put it on me,’ cried Chris – And then he side-stepped the issue completely to produce one of those beautiful historical vignettes his incredibly wide reading and fluency makes him so good at.
(Chinua Achebe, 1987, Anthills of the Savannah)
… how does one begin to explain the downtrodden drivers’ wistful preference for a leader driving not like themselves in a battered and spluttering vehicle but differently, stylishly in a Mercedes and better still with another downtrodden person like themselves for a chauffeur? Perhaps a root-and-branch attack would cure that diseased tolerance too, a tolerance verging on admiration by the trudging jigger-toed oppressed for the Mercedes-Benz-driving, private-jet-flying, luxury-yacht-cruising oppressor. An insistence that the oppression be performed in style!
(Chinua Achebe, 1987, Anthills of the Savannah)
It was thus he mused while taking his long, solitary walks through the pine forests that surrounded his hotel. He was not one of those people – do they exist anywhere except in books? – who think in a straight line, with unescapable logic. Walking helped him to think, but that meant that walking allowed him to bob up and down in the warm bath of a mass of disjointed reflections.
(Robertson Davis, 1988, The Lyre of Orpheus)
Children, there’s this thing called civilisation. It’s built of hopes and dreams. It’s only an idea. It’s not real. It’s artificial. No one ever said it was real. It’s not natural, no one ever said it was natural. It’s built by the learning process; by trial and error. It breaks easily. No one ever said it couldn’t fall to bits. And no one ever said it would last for ever.
…
There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress. It doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-endingly retrieving what is lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.
(Graham Swift, 1983, Waterland)
A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you’ll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you’ll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don’t. You can’t. Somehow it’s already too late. And maybe it’s even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And that what you feared will happen has already taken place.
(Richard Ford, 1995, Independence Day)
He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.
(James Joyce, 1916, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man)
‘…You know I’ve been reading Ulysses Grant, Frank.’ He nods profoundly. ‘When Grant was dying, you know, he said, “I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.”’ Herb takes off his glasses and holds them in his big linesman’s fingers, examining their frames. His eyes are red. ‘That has some truth to it, Frank. But what the hell do you think he meant by that? A verb?’ Herb looks up at me with a face full of worry. ‘I’ve been worried about that for weeks.’
…
‘I’ll just tell you what I think it means,’ Herb says, narrowing his weakened eyes. ‘I think he thought he’d just become an act. You understand that, Frank? And that act was dying.’ ‘I see.’ ‘And that’s terrible to see things that way. Not to be but just to do.’
(Richard Ford, 1986, The Sportswriter)
She too wants me to catch hold of her, he thought. That’s why she came with me to the tram. I could easily catch hold of her when she comes up to my step: nobody is looking. I could hold her and kiss her.
But he did neither: and, when he was sitting alone in the deserted tram he tore his ticket into shreds and stared gloomily at the corrugated footboard.
(James Joyce, 1916, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man)
Reckless with enjoyment, one man held up a bottle of lemonade and shook it, his thumb over the neck, to splash it about like celebration champagne. There was laughing and cuddling and general pagan revelry.
(Janice Galloway, 1996, Where You Find It)
“Do it!” I say. “Do one thing or the other, you bastard, but don’t try to cloud my healthy eye with your melancholy breath!”
(Henry Miller, 1934, Tropic Of Cancer)
For about an hour there is a deathlike calm during which the vomit is mopped up. Suddenly the trees begin to screech. From one end of the boulevard to the other a demented song rises up. It is like a signal that announces the close of the exchange. What hopes there were are swept up. The moment has come to void the last bagful of urine. The day is sneaking in like a leper.
(Henry Miller, 1934, Tropic Of Cancer)
I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse…
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.
It is to you Tania that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better, more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented to listen to me.
(Henry Miller, 1934, Tropic Of Cancer)
My own history I think of as a postcard with changing scenes on one side but no particular or memorable messages on the back. You can get detached from your beginnings, as we all know, and not by any malevolent designs, just by life itself, fate, the tug of the ever-present. The stamp of our parents on us and of the past in general is, to my mind, overworked, since at some point we are whole and by ourselves upon the earth, and there is nothing that can change that for better or worse, and so we might as well think about something more promising.
(Richard Ford, 1986, The Sportswriter)
Can this be it,
this quiet table, ordinary,
honey-warm and smooth as acorns,
lit by a century’s slanting suns
through evening western windows?
Can this be it,
this fine stripped pine,
stripped
to bare essentials,
its tall-turned legs too poised,
too clean,
for shadowed housemaids, staring
into chapped, red hands,
their shoulders aching from those much too heavy trays?
Can this be it,
its simple drawer
still fronted with its hand-dark, wooden knob,
cracked and sprung now in a fanning peacock’s tail,
all emptied of its patchwork hopes,
its pins and letters,
hoarded pennies, scraps of tape,
and fingered ribbons from a long-gone, laughing lad?
Can this be it,
this plain, still presence,
this patient waiting friend?
If this so quiet table,
here beneath my hand,
should come to be my singing, serving angel
I will line its drawer with dreams…
(Margaret Tufton, 1986, Old Pine Table)
