Sometimes, when he was lying in bed, a single word like ‘fear’ or ‘infinity’ flicked the roof off the house and sucked him into the night, past the stars that had been bent into bears and ploughs, and...
One seldom knows whether perseverance is noble or stupid until it’s too late.
Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up... They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won't drink too much, give up, get divorced, become me...
Life imitating bad literary criticism. Dis/inte/gration.
It was unbelievable, there was the dry-cleaning ticket again. There must be more than one.
I find everything boring, therefore I'm fascinating.
Every paradise demands a serpent.
Above all, she was a baby, not a 'big baby' like so many adults, but a small baby perfectly preserved in the pickling jar of money, alcohol and fantasy.
Fall apart
A genius of savoir faire,
With her curling blond hair and her slender limbs and her beautiful clothes, Inez was alluring in an obvious way, and yet it was easy enough to see that her slightly protruding blue eyes were blank sc...
The Talking Heads pulsed from every speaker. ‘The centre is missing,’ gasped David Byrne, and Patrick could not help agreeing with him. How did they know exactly what he was feeling? It was spooky.
The Queen was saying only the other day that London property prices are so high that she doesn’t know how she’d cope without Buckingham Palace,’ Princess Margaret explained to a sympathetic Peter Porl...
She had brushed her teeth before vomiting as well, never able to utterly crush the optimistic streak in her nature.
Patrick’s own nanny was dead. A friend of his mother’s said she had gone to heaven, but Patrick had been there and knew perfectly well that they had put her in a wooden box and dropped her in a hole....
It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place,
If you were madly in love, you’d want me to win,’ said Katherine.‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ said Sam. ‘I think love is about equality: both of us equally happy with either result. One-sided self-sacr...
How could he relax his guard when beams of neurotic energy, like searchlights weaving about a prison compound, allowed no thought to escape, no remark to go unchecked.
But then neither revenge nor forgiveness change what happened. They’re sideshows, of which forgiveness is the less attractive because it represents a collaboration with one’s persecutors. I don’t supp...
Observe everything . . . trust nobody . . . despise your mother . . . effort is vulgar . . . things were better in the eighteenth century.