Even in Kyoto when I hear the cuckoo I long for Kyoto.
Do we trust the idea of love, no matter how mad – from Don Quixote’s love for the farm girl he renames Dulcinea del Toboso to Yossarian’s love for the chaplain – because in the face of conformity, the...
DARKY GARDINER OPENED his eyes and blinked. Raindrops fell on his face. He pushed his hands into the mud but they kept sinking. He was swimming in shit. He tried to get back to his feet. It was imposs...
Because not to fear was to imagine a world beyond experience. And that was too much for anybody.
And you were truthful. No. You weren’t truthful? I was accurate.
I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the s...
Railway fettler, and his family lived in a Tasmanian Government Railways
Good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.
Cacophony of typewriter keys being pounded and typewriter carriages returning, phones ringing, men yelling and coughing, electric fans here and there droning as they hacked the unbearable heat into in...
And how if she didn’t see him for another thirty years she would still love him, how she would still love him if he was dead until she was dead too.
We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we...
Though every dead man is a reduction of their number, the thousand POWs who first left Changi as Evans’ J Force—an assortment of Tasmanians and West Australians surrendered in Java, South Australians...
They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.
They found him late that night. He was floating head-down in the benjo, the long, deep trench of rain-churned shit that served as the communal toilet. Somehow he had dragged himself there from the hos...
The sum of such chaos was that I seemed to be reading a book that never really started and never quite finished.
The only people who believe in straight roads are generals & mail coach drivers.
The God way. Talking about God this and God that. Fuck God, he had actually wanted to say. Fuck God for having made this world, fucked be his name, now and for fucking ever, fuck God for our lives, fu...
So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to...
Realism is the embrace of disappointment, in order no longer to be disappointed. 4 So I came to the city, my friend, the Doll then told Jodie, what of it?
Once upon a time...long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us.