It was a fabled railway that was the issue of desperation and fanaticism, made as much of myth and unreality as it was to be of wood and iron and the thousands upon thousands of lives that were to be...
Her eyes burnt like the blue in a gas flame. They were ferocious things. For some moments her eyes were all he was aware of. And they were looking at him. But there was no look in them. It was as if s...
When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.
Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of...
And one thing, as they sometimes do, led not to another, but shattered a world.
Smell its acrid horsehair upholstery and stale flour,
The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or sorrow or wonde...
In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as on...
At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work—an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not im...
I am part of all that I have met.
It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words - all the words that did not say things directly - were for him the most truthful.
يمكن احتواء الرعب داخل كتاب يمنحه شكلاً ومعنى. أما في الحياة فلم يعد للرعب شكل أكثر مما يوجد للمعنى. الرعب هو الرعب. وعندما يدهم يصبح كما لو أنه لا يوجد شيء في الكون غيره
Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans' earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blindin...
She always preferred strong lies to weak truths
For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human histor...
A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more...
There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.
Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites.For the line was broken, as all lines finally ar...
Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless...
Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than what we have been told. Maybe evolution has bee...