The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.
The past had shown him many times that the future would be its own solution.
She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start - she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never qui...
Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.
Since coming home, her life had stood still and a fine day like this made her impatient, almost desperate.
Now and then, an inch below the water's surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simpl...
He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
Memory's got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.
One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that...
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial...
There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact; remorse, or more drinking and then remorse.
The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.
Something has happened, hasn't it? ... It's like being up close to something so large you don't even see it. Even now, I'm not sure I can. But I know it's there.
I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite shoes.
Don't leave me here with my mind, I thought.
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
The conversation had turned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other
She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn’t let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.
Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.
No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It's an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.