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The hours of each day are rationed between unbearable heat and biblical rain,
She remembers feeling that the word England could be big, up for grabs, that no one got to own it. It could fit more inside of it than simply the white, the rich, the royalists.
Maggie swells with love for her friend and wonders why she loves people best when they are at their most vulnerable.
With Ed, nothing has a broader context. There is no history or politics or economics or art. Nothing is to do with anything. It’s just love lodged in her belly, too big and too old and too deep to be described.
He tells her that it feels as if his body were a custom-made, bespoke container, specifically designed for holding this one rare, very precious substance, which is her. That’s how it feels. Like this is what he was made for.
People in England are always apologising for having never been to Ireland, as if what they do with their annual leave is a matter of grave importance to Rosaleen. They speak as if they’re royals, with a God-given duty to travel to all corners of the Empire.
It was at the stage of May when the seasons accelerate without warning,
There are adults who thrive off the puncturing of children’s fantasies. Who did those children think they were? said the adults. What right had a child to their own happiness? Joan swore she would never puncture the fantasies of her own son: she would let him believe in anything.
Sometimes, he manages to grab on to the faintest wisp of his more-than-liking and corral it into rough verbal language. He grasps at words like jealously, or obsession, or infatuation. But these words don’t cut it. They are dwarfed by the scale of the task at hand.
we are living through a period of history during which certain kinds of queers have been granted certain kinds of freedoms, but those freedoms are precarious. They may not last our lifetimes.
Sometimes, she wonders why she and Ed couldn’t settle together into a sexless but pleasant marriage. Hadn’t that been what their grandparents did, and their grandparents before that? Why was it that her generation had to demand transformation, sex, adventure, comfort, stability, romance, conversation, intimacy, all from the one person? What’s so bad about settling?
