Time is how you spend your love.
You go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a f...
She believed in her own good timing, in timing itself, as a mystical force, a form of fate, operating at the global and cosmic level as much as at the personal.
You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don’t experience your self as natural or inevitable—as so many other people seem to do—and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with cer...
When I showed her my well-worn copy of Stormy Weather she reacted in a way I hadn’t anticipated, she was offended by it—hurt, even. Why was everybody black? It was unkind, she said, to have only black...
Well, maybe I use the wrong word in English. I mean that for Lamin the future is as certain as the past.
This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. In North London, where councillors once voted to change the name of the area to Nirvana, it is not unusual...
They didn't mean it to be like this. But it was like this. Both had other intentions. Howard had knocked on the door eight minutes ago, filled with hope, his heart loosened by music, his mind stunned...
There’s never any knowing—how am I to put it?—which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won’t have things hanging on it for ever. —E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread
The story was the price you paid for the rhythm.
The golden age of Luncheon Vouchers ended ten yearsago. For ten years Mickey had been saying, The goldenage of Luncheon Vouchers is over. And that’s what Archieloved about O’Connell’s. Everything was...
The Jackson gaffe, with its Oedipal violence (I want to cut his nuts out), is especially poignant because it goes to the heart of a generational conflict in the black community, concerning what we wil...
She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she'd ever meant by the word.
She held herself apart, always.
She had that thing most people don't have - curiosity. She might not have always got the right answers, but she wanted to ask the questions. It's very hard if you are interested in ideas and all that,...
She dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive.
Sacrifice was nine tenths of parenting.
Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.