It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thi...
It takes a long time to learn to live with loss, assuming you ever manage it.
It was too hot inside the hospital and the floors squeaked. There was a hand-gel dispenser outside the ward, and a big yellow sign above it read Do Not Drink. Did people actually drink sanitizing hand...
It’s SpongeBob, Eleanor, he said, speaking very slowly and clearly as though I were some sort of idiot. SpongeBob SquarePants? A semi-human bath sponge with protruding front teeth! On sale as if it we...
My life, I realized, had gone wrong. Very, very wrong. I wasn’t supposed to live like this. No one was supposed to live like this. The problem was that I simply didn’t know how to make it right.
The moment hung in time like a drop of honey from a spoon, heavy, golden.
No thank you, I said. I don’t want to accept a drink from you, because then I would be obliged to purchase one for you in return, and I’m afraid I’m simply not interested in spending two drinks’ worth...
Popular people sometimes have to laugh at things they don’t find very funny, do things they don’t particularly want to, with people whose company they don’t particularly enjoy.
Raymond hadn’t phoned anyone or asked an outside agency to intervene. He’d elected to look after me himself. I’d been pondering this, and concluded that there must be some people for whom difficult be...
She only really enjoyed her own company. She tolerated mine, but fundamentally she was a recluse at heart, like J.D. Salinger or the Unabomber.
She was, quite simply, a nice lady who’d raised a family and now lived quietly with her cats and grew vegetables. This was both nothing and everything.
After much reflection on the political and sociological aspects of the table, I have realized that I am completely uninterested in food. My preference is for fodder that is cheap, quick and simple to...
She’s not my type, to be honest.’ He took a noisy mouthful of beer. ‘I mean, looks are important, of course they are, but you’ve got to be able to have a laugh, enjoy each other’s company too, you kno...
Everything about this was true, even
Eyelids are really just flesh curtains. Your eyes are always ‘on’, always looking; when you close them, you’re watching the thin, veined skin of your inner eyelid rather than staring out at the world.
Eyelids are really just flesh curtains.
Human mating rituals are un-believably tedious to observe. At least in the animal kingdom you are occasionally treated to a flash of bright feathers or a display of spectacular violence. Hair flicking...
I did sometimes wonder what it would be like to have someone - a cousing, say, or a sibling - to call in times of need, or even just to spend unplanned time with. Some who knows you, cares about you,...
Learned, could be very demanding; I still had limited direct contact with them, which suited me just fine. From what I could gather, they would routinely be completely unable to articulate their requi...
I have yet to find a genre of music I enjoy; it’s basically audible physics, waves and energized particles, and, like most sane people, I have no interest in physics. It therefore struck me as bizarre...
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