And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us of time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point...
Afternoon sex was the best sex of all, Ann thought. Morning sex she'd had enough of in her time: usually it meant, 'Sorry about last night but here it is anyway'; and sometimes it meant, 'This'll make...
You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time, but that doesn’t matter. The world has been changed nonetheless.
You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: w...
You find yourself repeating, They grow up so quickly, don't they? when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.
What is History? Any thoughts, Webster?'
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is bec...
Old love is a row of beach huts in November.
Love means never having to say you’re sorry (on the contrary, it frequently means doing just precisely that).
Juntas a dos personas que nunca habían estado juntas. A veces es como aquelprimer intento de acoplar un globo de hidrógeno a otro de aire caliente: ¿prefieresestrellarte y arder o arder y estrellarte?...
Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally,...
In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone call, the telegram--were...
In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
I must confess that in all the times I read Madame Bovary, I never noticed the heroine's rainbow eyes. Should I have? Would you? Was I perhaps too busy noticing things that Dr Starkie was missing (tho...
Honour is not just a matter of internal good feeling, but also of external behaviour.
Cast out the beam from your own eye before you seek to extract the mote from the eye of another.
But then, no one told the whole truth about sex. And in that respect, nothing has changed.
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.