She dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive.
Racial homogeneity is no guarantor of peace, any more than racial heterogeneity is fated to fail.
Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power—local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic—on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But p...
People like us, we can’t be nostalgic. We’ve no home in the past. Nostalgia is a luxury.
People aren’t poor because they make bad choices. They make bad choices because they’re poor.
Overnight everyone has grown up. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.
On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can’t. On both occasions, the man breathes.
Not everyone wants this conventional little life you’re rowing your boat toward. I like my river of fire. And when it’s time for me to go I fully intend to roll off my one-person dinghy into the flame...
No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless. I
Michel is a good man, full of hope. Sometimes hope is exhausting.
Marcia would love this—sometimes people see visions of her in the churchyard. Marcia’s always having visions. Usually of white Madonnas, though, with blond hair and nice blouses from M & S. . . .
Like millions of British people, we paid our taxes in the hope that they would be used to establish shared institutions from which all might benefit equally.
It’s not just a matter of free books. A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three-dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.
It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants––packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends––that stand testament to the...
It was a journalist (it was always journalists these days), and she had something to read to him. She’d had a crash course in media relations since her exams, and dealing with them/it had taught her t...
Involved. At least that was the right word, Alsana reflected, as she liftes her foot off the pedal, and let the wheel spin a few times alone before coming to a squeaky halt. Sometimes, here in England...
Involved is neither good nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other's pockets... one becomes involved a...
If these are ‘talents’ – the ability to sing, or to quickly comprehend and reproduce musical notation – what kind of a thing is ‘talent’? A commodity? A gift? A prize? A reward? For what?
If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition...