Did all friendships—all relations—involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power?
He is a black man. He is often thought of as a nothing, a cipher. But he has layers upon layers upon layers.
He wanted to be in the world and take what came with it, endings local and universal, full stops, periods, looks of injured disappointment and the everyday war. He liked the everyday war. He was takin...
Her subject was pride, in all its forms.
I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are...
I was fourteen: the world was pain.
IT’S NOT FAIR! I CAN’T GO ON HAJJ. I’VE GOT TO GO TO SCHOOL. I DON’T HAVE TIME TO GO TO MECCA. IT’S NOT FAIR! Welcome to the twentieth century. It’s not fair. It’s never fair.
If someone asked her just then what memory was, what the of memory was, she would say this: the street you were on when you first jumped in a pile of dead leaves. She was walking it right now. With e...
In the university prospectus, an italic script over a picture of the Firth of Forth: Philosophy is learning how to die. Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you h...
It was a kiss from the past.
It was like tag, but a girl was never It, only boys were It, girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors,...
Most e-mails sent in the mid-nineties tended to be long and letter-like: they began and ended with traditional greetings—the ones we’d all previously used on paper—and they were keen to describe the s...
Obscurely disappointed, as we sometimes are when the things we profess to dislike don't happen, she looked up abruptly and smiled at him.
Or maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous.
There is a mania in the playground for grabbing vaginas.
They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all ov...
This because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the ai...
We are split people.
We will never be perfect: that is our limitation.
Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he found himself suddenly accosted by some kind of synaesthetic fixation with the woman: hearing the colour of her hair in the mosque, smelling the touch of her...
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