And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very har...
... Angus had a "pretty normal childhood." Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.
Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved,...
My father was an autodidact. It wasn't a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education - he had a horrible childhood. He got a place...
You walk into a room and your life ends but you keep on living.
Shop-bought cakes are a sign of sluttish housewifery.
Aphorisms. Not
When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wil...
When Lillian left work in the early evening the streets were slick and shiny with rain and the lamps flared yellow giving her the melancholy feeling that always came with the rain and the dark. She’d...
What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?
Well, we all get on,’ Sylvie said, ‘one way or another. And in the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there.’ It
Viola could start again—there are no second chances, life’s not a rehearsal, blah, blah, blah—yes, but if she could, if she could retake the journey that wasn’t really a journey, what would she do? Sh...
Ursula had grown rather callous about George Glover’s lungs, she had heard so much of them that they seemed to have a life of their own, rather like Sylvie’s mother’s lungs, organs that seemed to have...
They were lucky. They'd been given history.
The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.
Teddy thought of his wife and his sister as two sides of the same shining coin. Nancy was an idealist, Ursula a realist; Nancy an optimist with a lively heart, while Ursula’s spirit was freighted with...
Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
She was wearing an aggressive three-piece outfit that was probably very expensive but had the kind of pattern you would get if you cut up the flags of several obscure countries and then gave them to a...
She was twenty-eight but already jaded. Twenty-eight seemed a particularly unsatisfactory age. She was no longer young and yet no one ever seemed to take her seriously as an adult. People still told h...
She wanted to be left alone in peace, to disappear into her own quiet world and meditate upon death. Death. Yes, she could form that blunt, obscene word too. But instead she was the one who was going...