It’s not so long ago that men of your ilk believed in witches and superstition, I pointed out. Medieval times, he said, waving a hand in the air to dismiss the notion. This is 1867. The Church has com...
How can something still feel so painful after twenty-eight years, I asked myself. Is there no recovery from the traumas of our youth?
Every man is afraid of women as far as I can see, said Julian, displaying an understanding of the universe far beyond his years. That's true, she said. But only because most men are not as smart as wo...
По правде, Эмили была чудесная девушка, очень красивая, если это так важно, но с ней-то я и потерял невинность, а ни один разумный человек не женится на женщине, с которой он стал мужчиной. Это все ра...
The usual nonsense that people who know nothing about anything, like me, say when they don’t want their own days to be ruined by worrying about others.
The ground for I know not how long. Of course
That life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face.
Retractable roof, a pair of black, white and red
Monogamy is simply not the natural state for man, and when I say man I mean man or woman. It just doesn’t make sense to manacle yourself sexually to the same person for fifty or sixty years when your...
It struck me as extraordinary that the leaders of each of these countries bore such an intimate familial relationship to each other. It was as if the entire matter was nothing more than a childish gam...
There’s nothing more tedious than a grown man blaming his parents, birth or otherwise, for all the things that have gone wrong in his life.
There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them. John Boyne April 28, 1789: The real-life mutiny that inspire...
The same thing that’s happened
The last image I had of her was her sitting on the platform at Thorpe as a group of people stared at this distressed, weeping woman, and then her charging towards the glass of my window seat as the tr...
Seated opposite me in the railway carriage, the elderly lady in the fox-fur shawl was recalling some of the murders that she had committed over the years.
My mother was Eveline Hartford, said Maude, as if this would mean something to one or the other of us. So as you know, she simply adored chairs.
Life is suffering. Until the great day of judgement, when peace and equanimity may be restored for those who are pure of heart and deed.
La niñez se mide a través de sonidos, olores y suspiros, antes de que aparezca la sombra obscura de la razón. (John Betjeman)
I felt that this must be what it would be like to be married to someone, a constant back and forth of bickering, watching out for any stray comment in a conversation that might be corrected, anything...
He put his face to the glass and saw what was out there, and this time when his eyes opened wide and his mouth made the shape of an O, his hands stayed by his sides because something made him feel ver...