Architecture was what you had instead of landscape, a signal of loss, of imitation. Europe had it in spades...
Few landscapes have been so deeply known. And fewer still have been so lightly inhabited.
Everything imaginable had been done or tried out there. It wasn't the feeling you had looking out on his own land. In Australia, you looked out and saw the possible, the spaces, the maybes...
In Europe, the dimensions of physical space seemed compressed. The looming vertical presence of mountains cut me off from the horizon. I'd not lived with that kind of spatial curtailment before. Even...
In a seedy cinema on ru du Temple, watching Disney's Peter Pan with my son, I found that although we were all gazing at the same screen in the flickering dark, I was seeing a different film to the res...
The ute was casting a shadow that no light was ever gonna make. A shadow doesn’t search for a drain like that. Shadows don’t have blowflies drowning in them.
The whole underneath of Paris was an ant nest, Metro tunnels, sewer shafts, catacombs, mines, cemeteries. She'd been down in the city of bones where skulls and femurs rose in yellowing walls. Right do...
She was like a sheet anchor sometimes, a steadying influence on him, on everyone around her. Made people laugh, that sensible streak in her, but it also made her someone of substance.
Don’t you see it Jaxie Clackton, you are an instrument of God.’ ‘Oh, I said, you mad fucker. You been out under the moon too long.
The only end some things have is the end you give em.
Inside those waves our voices bounced back at us, deeper and larger for all the noise, like the voices of men.
There's things that have no finish, Scully, no ending to speak of. There's no justice to it, but that's the God's truth. The only end some things have is the end you give em.
Drug dealing worse than kiddy fiddling, is it? Stop that, now! There’s no need and you’ve no right. You think the Catholics care how they make their money? They bloody love gangsters, it’s their bread...
Old Scully, who according to Jennifer, hadn't the imagination to think the worst. Something she said once, as though neurosis was an artform.
It’s a dangerous feeling getting noticed, being wanted. Getting seen deep and proper, it’s shit hot but terrible too. It’s like being took over. And your whole skin hurts like you suddenly grew two si...
There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we've created ourselves.
Elbows-out walk like a scorpion all burred up for a fight
Anything with blood in it can probably go bad. Like meat. And it’s the blood that makes me worry. It carries things you don’t even know you got.
It's how I fill the time when nothing's happening, thinking too much, flirting with melancholy
I spose it’s wrong to pray that someone dies… But I’ve thought about all the prayers. If that’s what I was doing them years…Asking something, someone, anything, for a big black anvil to fall from the...