We strive for heights bit our natures betray us, Chamcha thought; clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him
Things—even people—have a way of leaking into each other, I explain, like flavors when you cook.
Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
They are the Eggheads. He is the Walrus.
The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.
The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.
Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see h...
She's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!
She says, trying uselessly to console me: 'What are you so long for in your face? Everybody forgets some small things, all the time!'But if small things go, will large things be close behind?
People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we...
Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.
It is all for love. Which is a wonderful and dashing matter. But which can also be a very foolish thing.
I'll tell you a secret about fear: it's an absolutist. With fear, it's all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it,...
He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence, that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the wor...
He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.
Happy birthday, Nicaragua. I drank a toast in the best rum in the world, Flor de Caña Extra Seco. Mixed with Coke, it was called a Nica-libre, and after a few glasses I was ready to take on the salsa...
From 'The Suicide', a play by the Russian writer Nikolai Erdman: 'Only the dead can say what the living are thinking.
Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the ai...
But sixteen years without optimism had taken a heavy toll;