لقد نجوتنجا كي يحكي الحكاية- هذا ما يقوله الناس،أليس كذلك؟ التاريخ ليس أكاذيب المنتصرين كما قلت ذات مرة ببساطة لجو هنت الأب.أدرك الآن أنه أقرب لأن يكون ذكريات الناجين:أولئك الذين لم ينتصروا ولم ينهزمو...
Ах, век мифов и легенд. Шарлемань, рыцарство, горный Пиренейский перешеек, будущее Европы, будущее всего Христианского мира на чаше весов, героический арьергард, рог зовущий на битву, человеческая жиз...
Fossicking
You realize that tough love is also tough on the lover.
You can take Lucas to watch football when he’s older,’ she once told me. Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing differ...
Yes it was, but as I said, it depended on where—and who—you were. If you’ll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn’t experience the sixties until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that m...
Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.
What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realise...
We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And i...
This was hopeless. In a novel, Adrian wouldn’t just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn’t behave as he woul...
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.
There was something a bit sinister about Noah’s devotion to God; creepy, if you know what I mean.
The strong cannot help confronting; the less strong cannot help evading.
The pigs and sheep you see walking around today are zombies compared to their effervescent ancestors on the Ark. They’ve had the stuffing knocked out of them. And some of them, like the turkey, have t...
The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.
So, you see, we’re a played-out generation. All the best ones went. We were left with the lesser ones. It’s always like that in war. That’s why it’s up to your generation now.’ But I don’t feel part
Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.
Remorse, etymologically, is the action of biting again: that's what the feeling does to you. Imagine the strength of the bite when I reread my words. They seemed like some ancient curse I had forgotte...
Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
No sooner do we come into this world,’ said Flaubert, ‘than bits of us start to fall off.