It just doesn’t make sense, Elizabeth insisted. Are we supposed to believe that civilization has just come to an end?Well, Clark offered, it was always a little fragile, wouldn’t you say? They were si...
I was in the hotel, he said finally. I followed your footprints in the snow. There were tears on his face. Okay, someone said, but why are you crying? I’d thought I was the only one, he said.
I wanted to be her north star. I wanted to be her map. I wanted to drink coffee with her in the cafes in the morning and do things, as you do, as she did, instead of just philosophizing about them and...
I am heartless, she thinks, but she knows even through her guilt that this isn’t true. She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someon...
He was thinking of the book, and what Dahlia had said about sleepwalking, and a strange thought came to him: had Arthur seen that Clark was sleepwalking? Would this be in the letters to V.? Because he...
He stared at his crown and ran through a secret list of everything that was good.
He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight.
He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the shee...
Dieter walked a little ahead of the other actors, murmuring to his favourite horse. The horse, Bernstein, was missing half his tail, because the first cello had just restrung his bow last week.
Did I ever tell you about my last phone call? Garrett asked. Yes, Clark said gently. I believe you did. Garrett had had a wife and four-year-old twins in Halifax, but the last call he’d ever made was...
Because he had been sleepwalking, Clark realized, moving half-asleep through the motions of his life for a while now, years; not specifically unhappy, but when had he last found real joy in his work?...
And for me, now as then, it is too much. There is too much world.
Although actually when she thought about it, Annette said, the post-apocalyptic movies she’d seen had all involved zombies. I’m just saying, she said, it could be much worse.
All three caravans of the Travelling Symphony are labelled as such, THE TRAVELLING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival i...
Her. It was a lump of glass with a storm cloud trapped inside. In the lobby, the people gathered at the bar clinked their glasses together. To Arthur, they said. They drank for a few more minutes and...
But the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.
All the shadows and light and splendorous horrors that make up the riptides of life on earth.
Zu Hause, das ist eine kleine, dunkle Wohnung mit einer täglich wachsenden Wollmauspopulation.
You look like an executive, she said to herself in the mirror, and the thought that flitted behind this was You look like a stranger. She pushed it away.
Wir waren nicht für diese Welt bestimmt. Ich bin in meine Stadt zurückgekehrt, in mein zerbrochenes Leben und mein kaputtes Zuhause, in meine Einsamkeit, und versuchte zu vergessen, wie süß das Leben...