Walking into the crowd was like sinking into a stew - you became an ingredient, you took on a certain flavour.
Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she fee...
Today she wears her habitual expression of strained anxiety; she smells of violets.
Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.
To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again, said the ancient Egyptians: not always what one might wish.
To go from a familiar thing, however undesirable, into the unknown, is always a matter for apprehension, and I suppose that is why so many people are afraid to die.
This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing.
They did not set out to disappoint their father, not on purpose, but neither did they wish to shoulder the lumpy, enervating burden of the mundane.
There's always a black market, there's always something that can be exchanged.
There were still newspapers, then. We used to read them in bed. It's French, he said. From . Help Me.
Then there's the twoof us. This wordis far too short for us, it has onlyfour letters, too sparseto fill those deep barevacuums between the starsthat press on us with their deafness.It's not love we do...
Then I find I'm not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there. I hope they get hard at the sight of us and have to rub themselves against the painted barriers, surre...
The written word is so much like evidence — like something that can be used against you later.
The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe...
The threshold of a new house is a lonely place.
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
The lock splits. The iron gate swings open. She emerges, raises her arms towards the suddenly chilled moon. The world changes.
The door of Reverend Verringer’s impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is usher...
The combination of presence and anonymity - confession without penance, truth without consequences - it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another.
The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand.