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You could see them remembering everything, the existence, turning rigid when your father’s shadow crossed the floor. Leaving, they’d feel cured, impatient to get away.
Your turn at boarding school never came. By then your father saw no point in educating girls; you’d go off and another man would have the benefit of your education.
She waves a cowardly little wave, and you wonder if she will ever forgive you for leaving her there with her husband.
the wind is strangely human. A tender speech is combing through the willows. In a bare whisper, the elms lean.
There’s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.
‘You have to stand back and let them at it, let them make their own mistakes. That’s the trouble. And if you don’t go to that trouble, you ask for more.’
It’s what she once wanted but two people hardly ever want the same thing at any given point in life. It is sometimes the hardest part of being human.
It is three years since anyone touched him and the tenderness in the stranger’s hands alarms him. Why is tenderness so much more disabling than injury?
She said self-knowledge lay at the far side of speech. The purpose of conversation was to find out what, to some extent, you already knew.
She believed that in every conversation, an invisible bowl existed. Talk was the art of placing decent words into the bowl and taking others out. In a loving conversation, you discovered yourself in the kindest possible way, and at the end the bowl was, once again, empty.
Where is God? he has asked, and tonight God is answering back. All around the air is sharp with the tang of wild currant bushes. A lamb climbs out of a deep sleep and walks across the blue field. Overhead, the stars have rolled into place. God is nature.
He remembers all those dandelions gone to seed and how he said he would always love her. He remembers these things, in full, and feels no shame. How strange it is to be alive.
‘After three pints there’s nothing you’ve not done,’ says Norris. ‘And after two there’s nothing you won’t do!’ says Leyden,
He has never understood the human compulsion for conversation: people, when they speak, say useless things that seldom if ever improve their lives.
‘What would you know about love?’ This strikes her sore. ‘I do know about love,’ Martha insists. ‘You don’t even love Daddy. All ye care about is money.’
He ate the oranges and thought about these women, concluding that there was little difference between them. By the time the last seed was on the coals, he was glutted. ‘Another casualty,’ he said aloud in the empty room.
Nothing in the house she’d come across meant anything.
Stack, like every man who has never known a woman, believed he knew a great deal about women.
A man was a nuisance and a necessity.
