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‘Tha mother’s mad, tha knows,’ she kept saying. She might have been right, but there was nothing I could do about it.
Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.
We pointed the finger, but big fleas have little fleas on their back to bite them.
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.
‘The Lord forgives and forgets,’ the pastor told me. Perhaps the Lord does, but my mother didn’t. While I lay shivering in the parlour she took a toothcomb to my room and found all the letters, all the cards, all the jottings of my own, and burnt them one night in the backyard. There are different sorts of teachery, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. She burnt a lot more than the letters that night in the backyard. I don’t think she knew. In her head she was still queen, but not my queen any more, not the White Queen any more.
On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant that grows growing circular-wise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart an orange tree. This fruit had tripped up athletes while others have healed their wounds. All true quests end in this garden, where the split fruit pours forth blood and the halved fruit is a full bowl for travellers and pilgrims. To eat of the fruit means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things,
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There are shades of meaning, but a man is a man, wherever you find it.
I knew my mother hoped I would blame myself, but I didn’t. I knew now where the blame lay. If there’s such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.
Of course people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things, so there’s no need to take it personally.
No, he wouldn’t kill me, soft-voiced men do not kill, they are clever. Their kind of violence leaves no visible mark.
If she talked about it, good and bad, they would think her mad, and then she would have no one. She had to pretend she was just like them, and when she made a mistake, they smiled and remembered she was foreign.
If the demons lie within they travel with you.
The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met.
