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Kindle Notes & Highlights
You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, a feeling, a piece of information – that you can’t quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn’t know how to close itself.
Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before.
‘Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it’
When you die the last thing you want is for your death to leak out and infect those left behind, for those loved ones to become a kind of living dead. And yet, inevitably, that often happens.
Those seven years I was with her contained more than anything else. Do you understand? You can take all the years before and since and weigh them next to those, and they wouldn’t stand a chance.
Marion had been told to follow me unseen. She wasn’t expected to kill me which was the one thing we had on our side.
Marion. My daughter. Rose’s daughter. She’s still the same little girl. That’s what people say, isn’t it? About children grown up.
Be honest. Honesty works. Well, honesty gets you locked up in a psych ward. But sometimes it works.’
But the thing is: you cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.
Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, this is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or we think we do. It’s a song we’ve heard. And it’s good to think of the past.
Most of all, I must acknowledge my wife and best friend Andrea Semple, who is the first reader I write for, and the first one to tell me what is and isn’t working, and who is a daily inspiration. The one I always want to stop time for. Thank you.
