Lanny

by Max Porter

Dinners where nobody speaks for a while, where we talk about books we’ve read, and someone falls asleep and it’s not weird or eccentric, it’s just slow and kind, unhurried and accepting. Acceptance is a fascination of mine.

Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?

Her life insurance policy is probably more expensive due to the dangerous proximity of creativity to her neat detached house with underfloor heating and wipe-clean walls.

you cannot fix the way the world is broken all on your own. You can’t get the water from our tap to that little boy in Africa.

What if we said what we really felt?

What if we, the too-polite sons and daughters of these old fuckers, actually started picking them up on their warped world-view, on their grotesque self-interest and petty entitlement?

What if we, the generation of people who remember the war, actually told these frightful, entitled young people that this is a country we fought for, that you cannot simply buy a sense of belonging on your mobile phone.

There is no such thing as trust. It’s a pernicious myth.

None of us actually feel anything for anyone else. It’s all pretend.

Missing child or no missing child, we shouldn’t have to wait six minutes for two pints of Foster’s.

The very idea of a safe place is tyrannical.

Like the last speaker of any language he has had to forget in order to survive, but some knowledge of it lives in his marrow.