Every paradise demands a serpent.
I still get more wedding invitations, but I find I enjoy the memorials more.’ ‘Because you don’t have to bring a present?’ ‘Well, that helps a great deal, but mainly because one gets a better crowd wh...
It was as if every time she played the ace of spades, it was beaten by a small trump.
Old enough to remember the arrival of 'Have a nice day', Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of 'Have a great one'. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? 'You have...
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....
Presumably those who enjoyed inflicting cruelty could hardly believe their luck and set about popularizing the superstition that their victims could only achieve peace of mind by forgiving them.’ ‘You
She liked the feeling that Maine was basically inhospitable, that it would soon shake out its summer visitors, like a dog on a beach.
What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional and hope that the fiction lay at the service of a truth less richly represented by the original facts?
What was the thread that held together the scattered beads of experience if not the pressure of interpretation? The meaning of life was whatever meaning one could thrust down its reluctant throat.
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.
Could one have a time-release epiphany, an epiphany without realizing it had happened? Or were they always trumpeted by angels and preceded by temporary blindness, Patrick wondered, as he walked down...
Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.
He was perfect in his way,’ said Patrick.
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.
If the Watson-Scotts were just a little too obscure, at least everyone was agreed that Bridget was flavour of the month and he was a lucky dog to have her.
If they made a film of my inner life, it would be more than the public could take. Mothers would scream, Bring back The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so we can have some decent family entertainment!
She imagined vodka poured over ice and all the cubes that had been frosted turning clean and collapsing in the glass and the ice cracking, like a spine in the hands of a confident osteopath.
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