Sticks and stones may break my bones’, as they say in the Middle Worlds, but with the right words you can build a world and make yourself the king of it.
Polite contempt. The barbed and poisonous weapon of the righteous.
It's never too late to come home, he said, and pulled me gently, insistently toward him.All you have to do...is stop moving away.
It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.
I don't think that white collar gives you sole right of access to the divine.
After all, words are what remain when all the deeds have been done. Words can shatter faith; start a war; change the course of history. A story can make your heart beat faster; topple walls; scale mou...
They tell you revenge isn't worth it. I say there's nothing finer.
There's also a lot of random stuff about poetry, flowers and lute music, plus kissing and cuddling (lots of this), wearing similar outfits, talking incessantly about the current object of devotion, an...
Everything comes home, my mother used to say; every word spoken, every shadow cast, every footprint in the sand. It can't be helped; it's part of what makes us who we are.
Weeds and wheat cannot grow peacefully together. Any gardener could tell you the same thing.
This is something different again. A feeling of peace. The feeling you get when a recipe turns out perfectly right, a perfectly risen souffle, a flawless sauce hollandaise. It's a feeling which tells...
That's Catholicism for you. A perpetual war between repression and excess.
Sheep are not the docile, pleasant creatures of the pastoral idyll. Any countryman will tell you that. They are sly, occasionally vicious, pathologically stupid. The lenient shepherd may find his floc...
Places have their own characters. . . . But the people begin to look the same.
Old habits never die. And when you've once been in the business of granting wishes, the impulse never quite leaves you
It isn't just a village. The houses aren't just places to live. Everything belongs to everybody. Everyone belongs to everyone else. Even a single person can make a difference.
He was the cleanest-cut comic-book schoolboy hero imaginable.
All those moments, those memories. Everything that we are, compressed in just two or three kilos of paper — the weight of a human heart.
What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?
To be a mother is to live in fear. Fear of death, of sickness, of loss, of accidents, of strangers, of the Black Man, or simply those small everyday things that somehow manage to hurt us most: the loo...