Your employers evince great faith in your talents, Mr Ewing, to entrust you with business neccessitating such a long & arduous voyage. I replied that, yes, I was a senior enough notary to be entrusted...
Young mothers are the most vicious tribe in the world if you don't fit in.
Yay, Old Uns' Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an' made miracles ord'nary, but it din't master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o' humans, yay, a hunger for more.More what? I asked. Old Uns'd...
Why do things at all? What is it that stops the world simply . . . seizing up?. . . . Do you know?. . . . I don't know the answer, no. Sometimes I think it's the only question, and that all the other...
When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I’d be one day to look inside it.
What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations – millennia – to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub thems...
The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.
Obscurity is Japan's outermost defense. The country doesn't to be understood.
My spine still works. That’s always useful.
I’d always worried but kissing’s not so tricky. Your lips know what to do, just like sea anemones know what to do.
It’s cold and clammy in the alley like White Scar Cave in the Yorkshire Dales. Dad took me when I was ten. I find a dead cat lying on the ground at the first corner. It’s gray like dust on the moon. I...
If people praise you, you’re not walking your own path.
I wince. From the Bank of Floorboards I withdraw my assets and redeposit the wedge of banknotes in my passport bag. This I secure inside my ski jacket, contemplating that, while the wealthy are no mor...
I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o’ that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who...
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.
I made it to Boxing Day because I was too miserable to hang myself. I lie. I made it to Boxing Day because I was too cowardly to hang myself.
I emerge into a library/study with the highest book population density I have ever come across. Book walls, book towers, book avenues, book side streets. Book spillages, book rubble. Papperback books,...
I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes...
I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.
Folks with most to complain about seldom complain most.