Lighthousekeeping

by Jeanette Winterson

So I lay down under the duck feathers and duck feet and duck bill and glassy duck eyes and snooked duck tail, and waited for daylight. We are lucky, even the worst of us, because daylight comes.

Considering luck under their eiderdown.

Why was money worth everything when you had none of it, and nothing when you had too much?

She hated saying yes. She was of those people for whom yes is always an admission of guilt or failure. No was power.

There’s a man on the moon. There’s a baby on earth. Every baby plants a flag here for the first time.

When we buried my mother, some of the light went out of me, and it seemed proper that I should go and live in a place where all the light shone outwards and none of it was there for us.

What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There’s no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending.

You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.

‘Keep me by you,’ he said. It was almost a prayer, but like most of us he prayed for one thing, and set his life on course for elsewhere.

‘If ships had had no crew when your father came to call, your mother would have not have been a disgrace.’ ‘And I would not have been born.’ ‘You would not have been an orphan.’ ‘If I hadn’t been an orphan, I would never have known Pew.’ ‘What possible difference could that have made?’ ‘The difference that love makes.’

‘Well, and that can’t be held as your fault. It’s no child’s fault to be born.’ ‘Is it a misfortune?’ ‘Don’t regret your life, child. It will pass soon enough.’

where every wife and sailor had to believe that the unpredictable waves could be calmed by a dependable god. Suppose the unpredictable wave was God?

There is no everything. The stories themselves make the meaning. The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.

The world is nothing. Love formed it. The world vanishes without trace. What is left is love.

I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. The world just pours it out.

‘This is not a lie,’ I said to myself. ‘It may not hold, but it is true.’

Life is so short. This stretch of sea and sand, this walk on the shore, before the tide covers everything we have done.