A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.
A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.
& she, armed with both & abandoning the joys of reason that had meant so much to her as well as me, made a suitably advantageous marriage with an ironmonger with a face like an anvil & a soul like a s...
Vessels with mini-subs and helicopters attached. As well as undertaking the more conventional
For a moment he wondered:what if this had all been a mask for the most terrible evil? The idea was too horrific to hold on to.
You could never know when everything might change—a mood, a decision, a blanket. A life. They
What do the hieroglyphs tell us of what it was like to live under the lash, building the pyramids? Do we talk of that? Do we? No, we talk of the magnificence and majesty of the Egyptians. Of the Roman...
To have been part of a Pharaonic slave system that had at its apex a divine sun king led him to understand unreality as the greatest force in life. And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreal...
To die of old age...is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death. It is the last and extremist kind of dying. It encourages people to lead a life devoted to not dying, which is really another way of n...
They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet. Beneath
The story enchanted me, and I took to carrying the book with me everywhere, as if it were some powerful talisman, as if it contained some magic that might somehow convey or explain something fundament...
The imprisoning scent of jasmine that always awakened in him a desire to flee.
Rock to gravel to dust to mud to rock and so the world goes, as his mother used to say when he demanded reasons or explanation as to how the world got to be this way or that. The world is, she would s...
Perhaps if Tasmania had been a normal place where you had a proper job, spent hours in traffic in order to spend more hours in a normal crush of anxieties waiting to return to a normal confinement, an...
One man’s feeling is not always equal to all that life is. Sometimes it’s not equal to anything much at all.
O amor é público, ou não é amor.
Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who th...
For the rest of his life he would yield to circumstance and expectation, coming to call these strange weights duty.
For beneath that delicate black powder something highly unusual was happening: the book’s marbled cover was giving off a faint, but increasingly bright purple glow.
For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it c...