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They show us that glory and power are shadows on a wall.
Ok plato i see you
Their burials, their fights, the tree they prayed at. The only green thing in all the quarry, and how in the end they pulled it down and ate it.
‘That scar, though. It does let you down a bit.’ She stops smiling.
Oi dickhead!
She just keeps wiping the table, but she has one of those faces where the feeling pours out through every feature, and I want to kiss her scar and tell her it’s beautiful, but I do nothing of the sort. Instead, I grab an arm, feel the muscle and say she looks strong, good for threshing wheat, and order a jug of the cheapest.
Special place in hell for people who make their insecurities other peoples problems! Go cry alone in your room at night like a normal person!
‘So,’ says I, ‘we have some fantastic examples of Attic armour to –’
Horrifically ive started to read this like uncle colm
liable to strangeness and sometimes incomprehensibility.
similar has been said about me
Hunger, what an odd thing it is. Is the source of all love a lacking? Is that what creates emotion? Not a presence but an absence. Do you need to be emptied to be filled?
Broken down and starving as they are,
Ok jeff buckley i see you
I have the feeling that the future and the past aren’t separate at all, just different snatches of a single song, always sung, given consequence when heard.
But this isn’t the silence that comes from comfort, no, it’s that strained silence, where you can feel the throb of the other’s thoughts; stillborn sentences that die on the lips before they’re spoken. I want to speak, but nothing right is coming, and so I just ask her if she’s got another stone in her shoe.
I say words that I hope will give you some of the pain I feel. I’m fucking scum.’
yes
For the world was once just a dream in a god’s eye, and the man who gives up on himself makes that very same god look away.
just ’cause their lives are fucked, it doesn’t mean they’ve nothing left. There’s always something left for the person who remembers.
It’s despair and meaning that are being pitted against one another, and it’s asking, if meaning departs from reason, might there not be wisdom in a faith-filled lunacy?
’Cause for the briefest moment, Syracusans and Athenians have blended into a single chorus of grief for this make-believe.
The hearts of men are alike wherever you go. The rest is scenery.’
Common sense is common, has no imagination, and only works by precedent. It leaves the man who follows it poorer, if not in pocket, then in his heart. Fuck common sense.
Those rats are the worst of everything under an indifferent sky, but the sound coming from the aulos, frail as it might be in comparison, well, that’s us, I say to myself, that’s us giving it a go, it’s us building shit, and singing songs, and cooking food, it’s kisses, and stories told over a winter fire, it’s decency, and all we’ll ever have to give, I say to myself, as my lungs burn and my eyes water, ’cause I don’t have much left, but I keep blowing away at the aulos, playing my song, but the rats are as loud as ever, and this is madness, I’m pouring water in the desert, hoping flowers
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:'(
I touch the letters and curse myself for not having learnt how to write her name. I’d have loved to have written that, and I could have put them together, hers and mine, joined the letters so that they made one word.
Only when I close my eyes are things clear.
I see Lyra too, and we’re moving about tinily beneath the staring sky, shivering with want, and mad with the conviction that this is it, cold ground below, eternity winking above, as we whisper our parts, and it seems to me a soft and delicate thing.
The correct wine to accompany each dish kept him awake.
As it does for most of us.
Yet, he reasoned, perhaps in the end, it was fitting, for his master was ever in love with misfortune and believed the world a wounded thing that can only be healed by story.
Most of all, thank you to my first reader and wife, Emma Durrant-Lennon. This book is dedicated to you, and so it should be. Your belief in my writing and this story kept me going. Everything has been better since you showed up in The Stag’s Head that night. I love you more than Gelon loves Euripides.
:')
