Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book. Well, Mumsy, no, not really. Your beloved large-print sagas of rags, riches, and heartbreak were no camouflage against the miseries tr...
Me había equivocado de estrategia desde el primer movimiento. Había tratado de salir de aquel absurdo a grito pelado, pero una vez internado eso es imposible. Los negreros reciben con los brazos abier...
Marinus is leaning on the railing. Warehouse number six needs rebuilding; there's a big hole in the seawall behind the guild; Constable Kosugi shall probably--from Seawall Lane comes an almighty sigh...
Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death.
Linda shares her packet of Custard Creams with me, and Marion says Picking is hungry work in her bunged up voice, and I say, Yeah, it is, Marion, and Marion's really happy, and I wish her life could b...
Letting it go feels so sodding liberating.
I’m not in the Scouts any more,’ I remind her. Mr Moody our scoutmaster told me to get lost, so I did, and it took the Snowdonia mountain rescue service two days to find my shelter.
If, by happiness, you mean the absence of adversity I and all fabricants are the happiest stratum in corpocracy as genomicists insist. However, if happiness means the conquest of adversity or a sense...
If swans weren't real, myths'd make them up.
I understood that one's environment is a key to one's identity, but that my environment, Papa Song's, was a key I had lost.
I remain thankful to God for all his mercies.
I play chess on my iPhone, and indulge in a fond fantasy that my opponent isn't a mind of digital code but Dad: It's Dad's attacks I repel; Dad's defenses I dismantle; Dad's king scurrying around the...
I know that don't sound senseful, but yarns 'bout Old-Un Smart an' flyin' dwellin's an' grown' babbits in bottles an' pictures zoomin' cross the Hole World ain't senseful neither but that's how it was...
How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body?
Her professional conscience is a collar. I hold the leash.
Her only friends on the estate were books, and books can talk but do not listen.
Hello, tiny life-form of star compost, did you know that your lizardly life, too, is billiarded this way and that by quantum scissors, papers and stones? That your particles exist in a time-froth of l...
He thinks of the all steps that gathered this party and marvels at the weaverless looms of fortune.
For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of.
Finally, I've reached the grandfather clock. Its face has no hands, only the words TIME IS, TIME WAS, TIME IS NOT. Highly metaphysical; deeply useless.