I met a girl while I was out there: Annie.She was American, travelling round like me.We hooked up, as she put it, and spent threemonths together. She wore plaid shirts, hadgrey-green eyes and a friend...
I love you. For a start, we'd better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with our elbow; in a bank. We shouldn't leave them lying around the house like...
I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact...
I found myself comparing my life against Adrian's. The ability to see and examine himself; the ability to make moral decisions and act on them; the mental and physical courage of his suicide. He took...
I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not,except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question on which so much d...
I am the obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into...
How attracted to one another we had been; how light she felt on my lap; how exciting it always was; how, even though we weren't having full sex, all the elements of it--the lust, the tenderness, the c...
His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he faile...
He also loved candelabra.
Had she told him that she loved him? Yes, of course, many times; but it was his imagination—the prompter’s voice at his ear—which had added the words for ever. He hadn’t asked what she meant when she...
Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; somet...
Grandpa, in his male armchair, deaf aid occasionally whistling and pipe making a hubble-bubble noise as he sucked on it, would shake his head over DAILY EXPRESS, which described to him a world where t...
Gradually, he didn’t doubt, the world would calm down into a gigantic welfare state devoted to sporting, cultural and sexual exchange, with the accepted international currency being items of hifi equi...
Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.
From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzy rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a to...
Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we...
Every day is Sunday—that wouldn’t make a bad epitaph, would it?
Every bird you downed bore pebbles in its gizzard from a land the maps ignored.
Es menos el recuerdo de un suceso que el recuerdo de una fotografía delsuceso. Y hoy día, como hemos perdido altura, precisión, foco, ya no confiamos tantoen la fotografía como en otra época. Las viej...
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not recommending one form of love over another. I don’t know if prudent or reckless love is the better, monied or penniless love the surer, heterosexual or homosexual love the...