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That was the east coast: for months on end you got bits of bad weather and lots of no weather. This was fine by him: he’d moved here to have no weather in his life.
We
The thing was, he’d never been much good at flirting; never quite said the right thing. And since the divorce, he’d got worse at it, if that was possible, because his heart wasn’t in it. Where was his heart? Question for another day. Today’s subject: flirting.
Heart of the matter
Guaranteed to fail on a regular basis and keep the Pope as happy as Larry.
Lol - quiet lol
said, ‘Do you think you could love me?’ ‘Yes I think I would love you.’ ‘Is that a would or a could?’ ‘What is the difference?’ He paused. ‘There’s no difference. I’ll take either. I’ll take both. I’ll take whatever you’ve got to give.’
Yes
‘No, “for sure” is American. English is “yes”.’
Shure
The view was pretending it had always been the same, for as long as people had sat at this café window. Except that there used to be a row of beach huts blocking the view. Then someone had burnt them down.
Burn with me
‘Cancer of the heart – is that possible?’ ‘Only as a metaphor, I’d say.’
Owner of a lonely heart
‘I bet Hillary never inhaled.’ ‘By their smoking shall ye know them.’ ‘Actually – as your token American present – Obama used to be a big smoker. Took to Nicorettes when he decided to run. But – fallen off the wagon, I hear.’ ‘That’s my man.’
I 😅
‘“The quality and nature of the contrition”
Max to min
‘No. He had Alzheimer’s.’ ‘Statistically, smokers get Alzheimer’s much less than non-smokers.’ ‘That’s because they’re already dead by the time it normally strikes.’
‘Stigmatising smokers, taxing the fuck out of them, making them stand on street corners in the rain, instead of thanking them for being the nation’s cheap dates.’ ‘It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand.’
Love is hypocrisy
Alice was surprised. In her world view, everything was hopeless, but you just had to get on with it. And there wasn’t much point changing what you believed at this late stage of the game. She considered whether to answer seriously or lightly, and decided on the latter. ‘As long as your god allows drinking and smoking and fornication.’
Oh, Alicia
‘Joanna, that’s another reason I love you. You’re able to impose narrative coherence on the likes of us at this time of night. What could be more flattering than a hostess who can make her guests imagine they’re sticking to the point?’
Coherence
are miles apart, so their relationship is metaphorical. Maybe even metaphysical. Then they become close, like similes, and there’s convergence.’
Converge
One wedding anniversary, he’d given her a card that read, ‘I have cleaned all your shoes’ – and he had, spraying everything suede against the rain, dabbing whitener on an old pair of tennis pumps she still wore, giving her boots a military shine, and treating the rest of her footwear with polish, brush, rag, cloth, elbow-grease, devotion, love.
Love
‘It is impossible to address deficiencies in the terroir, because there is no soil in your soil.’ ‘You’ve said that. So what is there instead?’ ‘Oh, stones mainly. Dust, roots, clay, ground elder, dogshit, catcrap, bird-droppings, stuff like that.’ He liked the way he had said ‘your soil’.
Yours truly
Marriage was a democracy of two, except when there’s a tied vote, in which case it descends into autocracy.
Blackberries
You said you didn’t like the idea of chained trees any more than chained bears or chained slaves.’
Chained
rus in urbe,
?
a time when for him fear and distrust of the world were about to turn into a hesitant love of it, when life was poised to lurch irretrievably in one direction or another, when, as it now seemed to him, you had a last chance to see clearly before being flung into the full business of being yourself among others,
That time around
the great moral faultlines of humanity had to be mapped from the possibly unrepresentative sample
Map the map
‘This feels to me like when you have a collection of blokes round a table and someone mentions how the size of your tackle is directly related … Dick, why are you putting your hands out of sight?’ ‘Because I know the end of the sentence. And because, frankly, I don’t want to embarrass anyone by obliging them to deduce the magnificence of my, as you put it, tackle.’ ‘Sue, a question. The class has in its last lesson been taught the difference between a simile and a metaphor. Now, which grammatical term would you say best described the comparison between the size of a man’s hands and the size of
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‘A human being is the only creature which can reflect upon its own existence, conceive of its own death, and fake orgasm. We’re not God’s special ones for nothing.’
The special ones
‘Well, a man can’t fake erection, anyway.’ ‘The cock never lies.’ ‘The sun also rises.’ ‘What’s the connection?’ ‘Oh, both sound like book titles. Only one is.’ ‘Actually, the cock does lie.’ ‘Are we sure we want to go there?’
Truth
Suffering diminishes the individual. Pain degrades.’
Pain and suffering
kissed his wife on the apron string round the back of her neck,
Mhm
But also, there’s no point in not being yourself, is there?
Who you are
‘Mutatis mutandis.’ ‘In propria persona.’
‘Way past the tipping point …’ ‘… and just as, in the past, people looked ahead and posited the rise of civilisation, the discovery of new continents, the understanding of the universe’s secrets, now we are looking at a vista of grand reversal and inevitable, spectacular decline, when homo will become a lupus to homini again. As in the beginning, so it was in the end.’
Comments
‘Res ipsa loquitur.’ ‘Tony, that’s enough.’
‘Are you saying that the pool of emotions remains the same size, but pours out in different directions at different times?’ ‘I might be saying that.’ ‘But surely we had our strongest emotions when we were young – falling in love, getting married, having children.’ ‘But now perhaps we have longer emotions.’ ‘Or our strongest emotions are of a different kind now – loss, regret, a sense of things ending.’
Time, notes, flow
There’ll be a futures market in rainfall or sunshine or whatever.’
Pearls
This was going to be the grammar of his life from now on.
The grammar doesn't change the syntax
The speed of it all, the process, the merciless tramp of events. He told it without tears, in a neutral voice, as if it might have happened to someone else. It was the only way, so far, that he knew how.
The only story
Time and rain and the warmth of the sun did the rest.
Her eyes and the palm of her hand
read: ‘Sir, the understanding does not cease to function when the portals of the mind are blocked.’
Mind portal
understood this modest transcendence of reality. And perhaps the collector, in his own mind, was only asking for a similar transcendence of reality when he demanded more dignity.
Collective soul
Your parents never warn you about the right things, do they? Or perhaps they can only warn you about the immediate, local stuff.
Demons
We were never warned about heartbreak.
Or that
I used the word ‘complicity’ a bit ago. I like the word. An unspoken understanding between two people, a kind of presense if you like. The first hint that you may be suited, before the nervous trudgery of finding out whether you ‘share the same interests’, or have the same metabolism, or are sexually compatible, or both want children, or however it is that we argue consciously about our unconscious decisions. Later, when we look back, we will fetishise and celebrate the first date, the first kiss, the first holiday together, but what really counts is what happened before this public story:
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Partnership over complicity
Do the slightest damage to the least important finger, and the whole hand is affected. Even the simplest actions – pulling on a sock, doing up a button, changing gear – become fraught, self-conscious.
A slight change
M— smiled. ‘Music seeks harmony,’ he replied, ‘just as the human body seeks harmony.’
Hi!
find a universal key, one that would permit the final understanding of what linked the heavens to the earth, the spirit to the body, all things to one another.
Pandora
Occasionally, man might glimpse the overarching connection, and feel able to grasp the universal harmony that lay beyond all local discordance.
Dissonance
M— talked generally; in his experience it did not help for the patient to be constantly aware of what was to be expected.
M talked
‘In my darkness, music was my entire consolation. To be brought into the light and then lose the ability to play would be cruel justice.’
In my darkness
sensitive, artistic child, in the face of such an emotional assault, might instinctively close herself off from the world seemed reasonable, even inevitable.
Forget-me-not
Moral fault and medical fault intertwined, giving birth to scandal. Such a miasma of innuendo
Moral fault
let’s not quibble over circumstantial detail.
Sure
in places and times where justice is approximate, possession is usually nine points of the law.
10 points
