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Like most of his plans, this one seemed so robust in his mind but fell like a flightless bird when released to the air.
She wouldn’t climb out of bed for her sister, but she had climbed into a crater. She wouldn’t cross a room, but she had crossed a continent.
Work isn’t meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.’
‘A question mark in your mouth is a dangerous weapon.’
There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.’
They passed a cigarette back and forth, and when he felt the damp of her lips on the filter, the world became big and beautiful.
We twist our souls around each other’s miseries. It is that which makes us family.
Life: a constellation of vital phenomena – organisation, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.
It was a rickety thing, with nails that kept falling out and books of matches under two of the table legs, a table the poorhouse would refuse, but one she had eaten from her entire life because spilled tea and tetanus wouldn’t kill anyone as fast as a pride-wounded father.
She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.
Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion.
