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People are icebergs, with just a bit you can see and loads you can’t.
This is peace, if you think about it—machine-gun nests being used as picnic tables.”
“Uncle Norm. My mum’s brother. Used to be a crane operator at Blue Circle Cement, but he’s stopped working. He’s going blind.” I take another deep drag. “That’s awful. Poor guy.” “Uncle Norm says, ‘Pity is a form of abuse.’
That’s the problem with boys: They tend to help you only ’cause they fancy you, but there’s no unembarrassing way to find out their real motives till it’s too late.
“What if … what if heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you’re dying of thirst, or when someone’s nice to you for no reason, or …” Mam’s pancakes with Mars Bar sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, “Sleep tight don’t let the bedbugs bite”; or Jacko and Sharon singing “For She’s a Squishy Marshmallow” instead of “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it’s not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. “S’pose heaven’s not like a painting that’s
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I ask, “What do you do in all these countries?” “Look around. Walk. Find a cheap bed. Eat what the locals eat. Find a cheap beer. Try not to get fleeced. Talk. Pick up a few words in the local lingo. Just be there, y’know?
Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.
Being born’s a hell of a lottery.
the English never remember and the Irish never forget.”
“Is taking photos of bridges, like, a hobby of yours, then?” The man thinks about this. “More a ritual than a hobby.” He sees I don’t understand. “Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going. My son died, you see. I take the photos for him.”
“Take care of yourself, young lady,” he tells me, “and don’t waste your life.”
Landowner. The bank owns the land and the land owns you. That’s what being a landowner means.
REALITY IS AN ILLUSION CAUSED BY A LACK OF ALCOHOL
“Shyness is cute,” says Gary, “but it stops you living. C’mon, I’ve got alcohol, nicotine … anything else you might need.” Christ, if guys could be girls being hit on by guys, just for one night, lines as cheesy as that’d go extinct.
You make a list, see. It’s called ‘All the Things I’ll Never, Ever Do to Get By.’ The list stays exactly the same, but its name changes to ‘All the Things I’ve Had to Do to Get By.’ ”
Control is about fear, see. If you’re afraid enough of the reprisals, you don’t say no, you don’t fight back, you don’t run away. Saying yes is how you survive. It becomes normal. Horrible, but normal. Horrible, because it’s normal.
Victims aren’t cowards. Outsiders, like, they never have a clue how brave you have to be just to carry on.
“Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.”
“People see your parents’ twenty-roomed mansion in the Cotswolds, your Porsche, your Versace gear and jump to all the wrong conclusions.”
“And don’t knock nepotism, Cheeseman; my well-connected uncles all agree, nepotism made this country what it is today.”
Cambridge is full of insiders’ words to keep outsiders out.
“If poor doomed Olly’s a Radio 4 play, what am I?” “You, Hugo,” she kisses my earlobe, “are a sordid, low-budget French film. The sort you’d stumble across on TV at night. You know you’ll regret it in the morning, but you keep watching anyway.”
“How many times have I told you?” says Dad. “It’s not—” “What you know but who you know,” says Nigel. “Nine thousand, six hundred, and eight, including just now.” “That’s why getting to a brand-name university matters,” says Dad. “To network with future big fish and not future small-fry.”
the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to us that our willful myopia about death is exactly that.
Still. Mariângela says that the best way to work with dementia is to act as if the person you knew is still inside the wreckage. If you’re wrong, and the person you knew is gone, then no damage is done but the standards of care stay high; if you’re right, and the person you knew is still bricked up inside, then you are the lifeline.
Sex may be the antidote to death but it offers life everlasting only to the species, not the individual.
Persuasion is not about force; it’s about showing a person a door, and making him or her desperate to open it.
Every Adam needs an Eve.
Patience is the hunter’s ally.
He’ll be eager to win the money back, and an eager player is a sloppy player.
Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.
What Cupid gives, Cupid takes away.
Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark. See how the light needs shadows.
They knew it in the Middle Ages. Life is a terminal illness.
When a woman is interested in you, she’ll let you know; if not, there’s no aftershave, gift, or line you can spin to make her change her mind.
This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator.
people are superb at not thinking about awkward truths.
love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death.
No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.
“You only value something if you know it’ll end.”
‘Anyder.’ A well-chosen name. The principal river on the island of Utopia.”
“A slumber did my spirit seal, I had no human fears.”
“She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.”
“No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees.”
“Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.”
The impossible is negotiable. What is possible is malleable.
the First Rule of Parenting states that you never wake a peacefully sleeping child.
When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist.
