There had always seemed to me a frightening amount of chance in the way that people chose their careers.
Then under the indifferent sky his spirit left the body with its ripped flesh, its infections, its weak and damaged nature. While the rain fell on his arms and legs, the part of him that still lived w...
The more you're challenged, the more rigidly you assert your beliefs. You have nothing to lose because without your beliefs you're nothing anyway: they make you what you are. It's shit or bust.
The Turks moved in the next day and killed everyone in sight, including the staff of the nursing home.
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they might be related to one another in ways frowned on by the Old Testament.
No, I want to take you out back and beat your fucking head on the floor.
Names came patterning into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moa...
I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.
How do you 'clear' your thoughts? You have only other thoughts with which to do the job; 'thoughts', therefore, are both blockage and broom. I suppose what we mean is that we should stop reasoning and...
But you must live your own life eventually. You have one chance only.
Yet on the dusky veranda she had seemed like a force of nature that had somehow sought out the landscape of his longing and moulded itself to each contour.
Weir heard something different in the sounds. Once, during a period of calm, he sat on the firestep waiting for Stephen to return from an inspection and listened to the music of the tins. The empty on...
That night Christine Hartmann went to bed with a book she had taken from among the many that lay strewn around the Manor. From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally prefe...
My direction? Anywhere. Because one is always nearer by not keeping still.
In God's name, she thought, let the more loving one be someone else; for me it is beyond endurance.
I'd become more adept at being with other people; I'd lowered my expectations of them and learned to let my mind drift into neutral when they spoke.
I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven't got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel I'm close to it. Some days, I'm so clo...
Busy is good, isn't it? Busy means we're hard at it, achieving our ends or goals. Haven't had time to stop, or look around or think. That's considered the sign of a life well lived. Although people co...
They saw the Scots coming up out of their burrows like raving women in their skirts, dying in ripples across the yellowish-brown soil. They saw the steady tread of the Hampshire's as though they had w...
If not just the brain but the quirks that made the individual were composed of recycled matter only, it was hard to be sure where the edges of one such being ended and another person began.