So I telled her my 'maginin's o' places from old books'n'pics in the school'ry. Lands where the Fall'd never falled, towns bigger'n all o' Big I. an' towers o' stars'n'suns blazin' higher'n Mauna Kea,...
Love’s a dictator. I know this, yet the blast furnace in my ribcage roars You You You You You You just the same, and there’s bugger-all I can do about it.
Killing depends on circumstances, as you'd expect, whether it's a cold, planned murder, or a hot death in a fight, or inspired by honor or a more shameful motive. However many times you kill, though,...
Just as I was flung over the threshold, I embraced Grigoire the Swiss Fiancé in a rugger grip, determined that smug cockatoo was coming with me...Stone steps and icy pavements bruised my own flesh as...
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. I’d been on the lo...
It’s a small world. It keeps recrossing itself. 59
It was only a wasp,’ I say, ‘there are plenty more where they came from.’ This is not good enough for Tomomi: ‘There are plenty more humans where we come from, so does that make homicide okay?
In the corridor outside, a trolley squeaks by. The brigadier I knew has left his bombed-out face, leaving me alone with the clock, shelves of handsome books nobody ever reads, and one certainty: that...
If you've never been through it, you can't understand it, not really. Lucky you, I say. Control is about fear, see. If you're afraid of the reprisals, you don't say no, you don't fight back, you don't...
If you'd cured Henry the Seventh's TB with a course of ethambutol, or given Isaac Newton an hour's access to the Hubble telescope, or shown an off-the-shelf 3-D printer to the regulars at the Captain...
I s’pose if some man’s been inside you often enough, it’ll take a while to get rid of him. Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.
I libri non offrono una vera via di fuga, ma possono impedire alla mente di scorticarsi viva.
He sifts the radio waves, but it's all men singing like women and women singing like men...
Half-sloshed mums’re rolling their eyes at sun-pinked dads burning bangers on barbecues.
Growing old is an unwinnable campaign. During this war we witness ugly scenes. Truths mutate to whims. Faith becomes cynical transactions between liars. Sacrifices turn out to be needless excesses. He...
Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you look at green, where’ve the yellow and the blue gone? Somehow this is to do with Moran’s dad. Somehow this is to do with everyone and every...
Foolproof depends on the size of the fool
Eva knows I'm terra incognita and explores me unhurriedly, like you did. Because she's lean as a boy. Because her scent is almonds, meadow grass. Because if I smile at her ambition to be an Egyptologi...
Eva is guarded in a schoolroom down on Earth, chewing her pencil, dreaming of being with me, I know it, me, looking down from amongst exfoliation apostles, dreaming of being with her.
Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark. See how the light needs shadows. Look: wrinkles spread like mildew over our peachy sheen; beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat, vari...