It is curious that in the retelling of a dangerous situation the explanation is often made to include a premonition of the disaster. Whereas, in truth, most accidents strike like a viper of lightening from an apparently clear blue sky. It is as though human beings like to pump up the importance of a near escape or even a catastrophe by placing the hand of destiny at the helm of calamity. •My camouflage, begun so many years before under the persecution of the Judge, was now threatening to become the complete man. It was time to slough the mottled and cunningly contrived outer skin to emerge as myself, to face the risk of exposure, to regain the power of one. I had reached the point where to find myself was essential. •The power of one is above all things the power to believe in yourself, often well beyond any latent ability you may have previously demonstrated. The mind is the athlete; the body is simply the means it uses to run faster or longer, jump higher, shoot straighter, kick better, swim harder, hit further or box better. Hoppie’s dictum to me: ‘ First with the head and then with heart’ was more than simply mixing brains with guts. It meant thinking well beyond the powers of normal concentration and then daring your courage to follow your thoughts. •Do you know why the English managed to conquer half the globe? Because they were so bloody stupid! Some half-witted lord jumped up in a general’s uniform would simply advance on a position and expend men, he didn’t care, they were only yeomen and slum slush, cannon fodder. He just kept sending them in and so help me they kept on going, until eventually he won. You call that bravery? I call that two things, murder and stupidity. The generals murdered their men and the men were too stupid to resist. •Doc had taught me the value of being the odd man out. The man assumes the role of the loner, the thinker and the searching spirit who calls the privileged and the powerful to task. The power of one was the courage to remain separate, to think through to the truth and not to be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expect to maintain power, whatever the cost. •I had survived by passing as unnoticed as possible, by anticipating the next move against me, by being prepared when the shit hit the fan to take it in my stride, pretending not to be hurt or humiliated. I had learned early that silence is  better than sycophancy, that silence breeds guilt in other people. That it is fun to persecute a pig because it squeals, no fun at all to persecute an animal which does not cry out. •It wasn’t until I went to boarding school for the second time that I learned that survival is a matter of actively making the system work for you rather than attempting merely to survive it. •I learned that the greatest camouflage of all is consistency. If you do something often enough and at the same time and in the same way, you become invisible. One of the shadows. Every recidivist knows this. In prison, to be successful, plans have to be laid long term. Habits have to be established little by little, each day or week or month or even year, a minute progression towards the ultimate goal. When a routine is finally set, authorities no longer see it for what it is, a deception; but accept it for what it isn’t: an authorised routine. The prisoner enjoys the advantage over his keeper of continuity. •Sometimes it’s best just to walk away from your memories, just put one memory in front of the other and walk them right out of your head. •I didn’t know then that what seemed like the end was only the beginning. All children are flotsam driven by the ebb and flow of adult lives. Unbeknownst to me the tide had turned and I was being swept out to sea. •The city had converted an elevated length of abandoned railway spur into an aerial greenway and the agent and I were walking south along it in the unseasonable warmth after an outrageously expensive celebratory meal in Chelsea that included baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death. •Peter comes home and sits down at the table next to Kira. They don’t know if they will ever stop feeling ashamed that they were forced to give up. How can anyone lose like this without dying? How does anyone go to bed at night, how do they get up in the morning? •There are few words that are harder to explain than "loyalty." It's always regarded as a positive characteristic, because a lot of people would say that many of the best things people do for each other occur precisely because of loyalty. The only problem is that many of the very worst things we do to each other occur because of the same thing. •She will always be this to them now: at best the girl who got raped, at worst the girl who lied. They will never let her be anyone but that. In every room, on every street, in the supermarket and at the rink, she will walk in like an explosive device. They will be scared to touch her, even the ones who believe her, because they don’t want to risk getting hit by shrapnel when she detonates. •The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. •Why does anyone care about sports? There’s a woman in the stands who cares because they’re the last thing she’s got that gives her straight answers. She used to be a cross-country skier at the elite level. She sacrificed all her teenage years to skiing long-distance trails, evening after evening with a headlamp and tears streaming from cold and exhaustion, and all the pain and all the losses, and all the things other high school kids were doing with their free time that she could never be part of. But if you were to ask her now if she regrets anything, she’d shake her head. If you were to ask what she would have done if she could go back in time, she’d answer without hesitation: “Train harder.” She can’t explain why she cares about sports, because she’s learned that if you have to ask the question, you simply wouldn’t understand her answer. •“When something goes right for a team everything feels easy, so it automatically goes even better. But if you can cause a bit of trouble for them, only a very little bit, you’ll soon see that they manage to create a lot more trouble for themselves.” It’s about balance. The slightest puff of wind can be all it takes. •A team is waiting in a locker room, sticks in hand, waiting for a game to start. A little brother is waiting on a bench with a phone in his lap, waiting to see what his friends will write about his sister on the Internet when they find out what’s happened. A law firm gets a call from a wealthy client, and at another law firm a mother starts a war. The girl goes on playing her guitar until her best friend falls asleep, and in the doorway stands a father, thinking that the girls will survive this. They’ll be able to deal with it. That’s what he’s afraid of. That that’s what’s going to make the rest of the world go on thinking that everything is ok. •There will be days when Maya is asked if she really understood the consequences of going to the police and telling the truth. She will nod. Sometimes she will believe that she was actually the only person who did understand. Much later, in ten years’ time, she will think that the biggest problem here was actually that she wasn’t as shocked as all the adults were. They were more innocent than she was. She was fifteen and had access to the Internet; she already knew that the world is a cruel place if you’re a girl. Her parents couldn’t imagine that this could happen, but Maya simply hadn’t expected it to happen to her. •Words are small things. No one means any harm by them, they keep saying that. Everyone is just doing their job. The police say it all the time. “I’m just doing my job here.” That’s why no one asks what the boy did; as soon as the girl starts to talk they interrupt her with questions about what she did. •Peter and Kira wake up happy. Laughing. That’s what they will remember about this day, and they will hate themselves for it. The very worst events in life have that effect on a family: we always remember, more sharply than anything else, the last happy moment before everything fell apart. The second before the crash, the ice-cream at the gas station just before the accident, the last swim on holiday before we came home and received the diagnosis. Our memories always force us back to those very best moments, night after night, prompting the questions: “Could I have done anything differently? Why did I just go around being happy? If only I’d known what was going to happen, could I have stopped it?” •Kevin gives him a quick hug, so fleeting that no one would notice, but still so hard that it speaks volumes. He can never sleep after games, and that’s the only time he smokes. Only best friends know that sort of thing about each other. Only two boys who once lay side by side under the covers, reading comics by flashlight and realizing that the reason they always felt like outsiders was because they were superheroes. •Robbie Holt is standing in the street hating himself. He wouldn’t have gone outside voluntarily today unless he’d run out of drink at home again. He looks at the roof of the rink, estimates in his head where they ought to be in the game now. It’s a peculiar sort of angst, the one he lives with, knowing that you had the greatest moment of your life at the age of seventeen. •The storm of laughter from all the juniors makes the room shake. In the end even David smiles, and he’ll think back to that moment many times afterward: whether a joke is always only a joke, whether that particular one went too far, whether there are different rules inside and outside a locker room, whether it’s acceptable to cross the line in order to defuse tension and get rid of nerves before a game, or if he should have stopped Lars and intervened by saying something to the guys. But he does nothing. Just lets them all laugh. He’ll think about that when he gets home and looks his girlfriend in the eye. •That tendency exists in all sports: parents always think their own expertise increases automatically as their child gets better at something. As if the reverse weren’t actually the case. •Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there’s always someone who’s freezing. •A long marriage is complicated. So complicated, in fact, that most people in one sometimes ask themselves: “Am I still married because I’m in love, or just because I can’t be bothered to let anyone else get to know me this well again?” •She’s ashamed to admit it to herself, but getting to work feels like a liberation. She knows she’s good at her job, and she never feels that way about being a parent. Even on the best days—the tiny shimmering moments when they’re on holiday and Peter and the children are fooling about on a beach and everyone is happy and laughing—Kira always feels like a fake. As if she doesn’t deserve it, as if she just wants to be able to show a photoshopped family photograph to the rest of the world. •All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to carry on. The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly how many. •“Culture” is an odd word to use about hockey; everyone says it, but no one can explain what it means. All organizations like to boast that they’re building a culture, but when it comes down to it everyone really only cares about one sort: the culture of winning. Sune is well aware that the same thing applies the world over, but perhaps it’s more noticeable in a small community. We love winners, even though they’re very rarely particularly likeable people. They’re almost always obsessive and selfish and inconsiderate. That doesn’t matter. We forgive them. We like them while they’re winning. •What has Aaron heard about me? What have they been telling him? There is that feeling when your own story is out of your hands. someone else is making you up behind your back, and it gives you a shiver of •The worst thing is that he thinks he’s the hero of this story, and he’s never, ever going to find out that he’s actually the bad guy. •Some people are lucky this way: Your life splits into hundreds of hallways, and you can briefly grasp all the lives you’ve had and all the people you’ve been even in your short span on this earth. You can see the infinite, never-ending math equation of it, and you realize that any way you tried to tell your life story would be wrong. You weren’t even one person! You aren’t even one person, even now, as you •And he gave me that same smile. That same interested smile he gave his TV show, and his patients, and for the first time I realized it was not a  human smile. It was a protective coloration. An adaptation of some sort. He would project it equally at a television, or a son, or a houseplant, but whatever was really inside him was crouched and peering out stealthily. “Let me know,” he said, “if you’d like to talk.” •Sometimes Jill would say, that seems reasonable. Sometimes she would say, that doesn’t really make sense. And that had been my guidepost for the better part of my life. Now there was no one to tell me the difference, and so my thoughts bobbed uncertainly as Aqil drove. •This little island that I’d built for myself, this family that had seemed so safe and stable, was dissipating beneath my feet. I watched as Aaron forked noodles into his mouth, and they were yellow like warning signs on a construction site. I felt a gaze pressing on my back. •Standing there in the doorway, gaping at the television, spooning ice cream into my mouth, I felt more than ever that I was not one person. I was the awkwardly shuffling, distracted dad that the boys may have vaguely noticed as he opened the freezer and rummaged; I was the kind of fussy, self-involved husband who pestered his dying wife with petty issues about his work life, until she had to beg him: Please. I can’t; I was the kind of man who would sit by your bedside and feed you ice chips from a spoon; I was also the one who thought that the ending didn’t have to be so grim, if only you tried harder. If only you’d be less pessimistic. •I nodded. We walked through these steps nearly every time we went over his “case,” and sometimes he repeated himself almost word for word. It was like a zoo animal circling in a cage, thinking that this time he was going to find an opening. •In a lifetime, maybe there is only one true experience of bliss, and maybe this was Wave’s. The peyote came forward in a surge and she heard herself say, “Oh!”—the way an actress would portray a sudden realization. “Oh,” she said, and then she wasn’t altogether in her body. •What happened to us? It was a question that interested her. Most people seemed to believe that they were experts of their own life story. They had a set of memories that they strung like beads, and this necklace told a sensible tale. But she suspected that most of these stories would fall apart under strict examination—that, in fact, we were only peeping through a keyhole of our lives, and the majority of the truth, the reality of what happened to us, was hidden. Memories were no more solid than dreams. •So I unaffixed myself from the mattress and put on some sweats but I couldn’t shake this feeling of shitty unfriendliness. There was the distribution of wrapped packages, the forced jollity, the desperation of a widower trying to make  “family memories.” I couldn’t stand it. I was thinking like, Oh, a book. Oh, a cheap video game. Oh, a sweater I will never wear. Thank you. May I go now? •And yet you’ll still feel this weird pinch of tenderness toward him. It was his dream to have sons who adored him, to be the fabled Good Dad, to be sweet and kind and wise, to be your buddy in your time of need, and you feel a twinge of compassion but combined with the urge to flee, to put as much distance between the two of you as possible. •His voice was kind of scratchy and deep, and it made me think of stoners and heavy-metal music from the 1980s. The intonation and inflection and so forth. First time I heard him it occurred to me that there are ways of speaking, maybe even certain ways of moving your tongue and your voice box, that only a particular generation of humans learn how to do. I sometimes thought that my uncle had a way of talking that was preserved in amber from 1983, and even from the first time he spoke to me I thought it was amazing. •My dad didn’t know this, of course. He doled out money for “books” and “expenses” without even blinking an eye—I guess he’d gotten some money from my mom’s insurance—and honestly the majority of our conversations involved him opening up his wallet and handing me some cash. Sometimes he would pop up and attempt an amateurish performance of a dad—he would go off on some digression about how constellations aren’t real, or how kale is really good for you, or how he wished we would have gone camping more when I was little. Did I want to go camping? Or he would lay some wisdom on me, Sufi wisdom, he said, which seemed completely random and impenetrable. Then he’d roam off, trailing his wisps of positivity through the house. Mostly we avoided each other successfully. •And now here he was, a forty-one-year-old man in his “study,” how pretentious, at his desk, at his computer, checking his email and going over his “notes” and he picked up the phone and he wanted to be in the mode that was the person he would have been if •In retrospect, Dustin couldn’t remember much that was significant about that particular morning when they discovered the body. The day was clear and cold and sunny, and he woke up and felt fairly happy—happy in that bland, daily way that doesn’t even recognize itself as happiness, waking into a day that shouldn’t expect anything more than a series of rote actions: showering and pouring coffee into a cup and dressing and turning a key in the ignition and driving down streets that are so familiar that you don’t even recall making certain turns and stops; though the mind must have consciously carried out the procedure of braking at the corner and rolling the steering wheel beneath your palms and making a left onto the highway, there is no memory of these actions. •Come now, they always said, and then you arrived to find two people waiting to get micro braids and still the owner would tell you "Wait, my sister is coming to help." •The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all. •“It terrifies you. That you missed out on something. That you gave up something you didn’t know you wanted.” A sharp, pitying smile pinched the corners of her lips. “What was it? Was it a boy? Was it a vocation? Or was it a whole life?” •While they wished to look out for each other, and to keep tabs on each other, staying in touch took a toll on them, serving as an unsettling reminder of a life not lived, and also they grew less worried each for the other, less worried that the other would need them to be happy, and eventually a month went by without any contact, and then a year, and then a lifetime. •To love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you. •You know what you learn when you study the legal system? Poor people pass down damage the way rich people pass down an inheritance. •In any case, she liked Jill Tillman better: there was something a little snappier about it, more acerbic, which suited her. She got on the phone—to talk to one of the boys’ teachers, or a construction contractor whose work wasn’t quite up to par, or some bureaucratic functionary—and she had found a perfect, crisp snap to the words. “This is Jill Tillman,” she would say, and a perfectly pleasant chill would spread across the syllables. “May I speak to your supervisor, please?” •His life, he thought, was a collection of the usual stuff: driving to and from work, listening to the radio, checking and answering his steadily accumulating email, shopping at the supermarket, and watching select highly regarded shows on television and reading a few books that had been well-reviewed and helping the boys with their homework, details that were—he was increasingly aware—units of measurement by which he was parceling out his life. •Back then I didn't realize how Michael noticed and didn't notice, how sometimes he saw me and then, whole days and weeks, he didn't. How in that moment, I didn't matter. •I don't want him to read my slowness as fear, as weakness, as me not being old enough to look at death like a man should, so I grip and yank. •I like to think I know what death is. I like to think it's something I could look at straight. When Pop tell me he need my help and I see that black knife slid into the belt of his pants, I follow Pop out the house, try to keep my back straight, my shoulders even as a hanger; that's how Pop walks. I try to look like this is normal and boring so Pop will think I've earned these thirteen years, so Pop will know I'm ready to pull what needs to be pulled, separate innards from muscle, organs from cavities. I want Pop to know I can get bloody. Today's my birthday. •It was not that cinemas and bookshops, restaurants and cafés had vanished from the city, just that many of those that had been there before were there no longer. •It was the sort of view that might command a slight premium during gentler, more prosperous times, but would be most undesirable in times of conflict, when it would be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as fighters advanced into this part of town: a view like staring down the barrel of a rifle. Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians. •It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does. •One day he’ll stop adding and subtracting income and expenditures in his head all the time. There’s an obvious difference between the children who live in homes where the money can run out and the ones who don’t. How old you are when you realise that also makes a difference. •The town wakes early, like it does every day; small towns need a head start if they’re going to have any chance in the world. The rows of cars in the parking lot outside the factory are already covered with snow; people are standing in silent lines with their eyes half-open and their minds half-closed, waiting for their electronic punch cards to verify their existence to the clocking-in machine. They stamp the slush off their boots with autopilot eyes and answering-machine voices while they wait for their drug of choice—caffeine or nicotine or sugar—to kick in and render their bodies at least tolerably functional until the first break. •She glanced at her brothers, at her mother, still in her bathrobe on their tree lawn and thought, They have literally nothing but the clothes on their backs. Literally was one of Lexie’s favourite words, which she deployed even when the situation was anything but literal. In this case, for once, it was more or less true. •She hoped her driver would not be a Nigerian, because he, once he heard her accent, would either be aggressively eager to tell her that he had a master’s degree, the taxis was a second job, and his daughter was on the dean’s list at Rutgers; or he would drive in sullen silence, giving her change and ignoring her “thank you,” all the time nursing humiliation, that this fellow Nigerian, a small girl at that, who perhaps was a nurse or an accountant or even a doctor, was looking down at him. Nigerian taxi drivers in America were all convinced that they really were not taxi drivers. •How was it possible to miss something you no longer wanted? Blaine needed what she was unable to give and she needed what he was unable to give, and she grieved this, the loss of what could have been. •And now here she was telling him it was over. “Why?” he asked. He taught ideas of nuance and complexity in his classes and yet he was asking for a single reason, the cause. But she had not had a bold epiphany and there was no cause; it was simply that layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her. She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out. •She said the word “fat” slowly, funneling it back and forward, and thought about all the other things she had learned not to say aloud in America. She was fat. She was not curvy or big-boned; she was fat, it was the only word that felt true. And she had ignored, too, the cement in her soul. •He felt that his father had done the right thing in changing jobs, that television sets and refrigerators and box-spring mattresses can speak to you for just so long and then a moment comes when you should jump ship and try something else, and because his father was so fond of tennis, why not earn his living from the game he loved? •It never occurred to him that she might have been exaggerating, that the grief she felt over losing her mother had distorted her vision, that she had pushed away her stepmother without giving her a chance, turning her into an enemy for no other reason than the fact that she was not her mother and never would be, that her overworked father was doing the best he could for his enraged and obstinate daughter, that there was, as there always is, another side to the story. Adolescence feeds on drama, it is most happy when living in extremis, and Ferguson was no less vulnerable to the lure of high emotion and extravagant unreason than any other boy his age, which meant that the appeal of a girl like Anne-Marie was fueled precisely by her unhappiness, and the greater storms she engulfed him in, the more intensely he wanted her. •Then came the newly sworn-in president, and the moment he began to deliver his speech, the notes emanating from that tightly strung rhetorical instrument felt so natural to Ferguson, so comfortably joined to his inner expectations, that he found himself listening to it in the same way he listened to a piece of music. Man holds in his mortal hands. Let the word go forth. Pay any price, bear any burden. The power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. Let every nation know. The torch has been passed. Meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe. A new generation of Americans. That uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war. Now the trumpet summons us again. A call to bear the burdens of a long twilight struggle. But let us begin. Born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace. Let us explore the stars. Ask. Ask not. A struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself. A new generation. Ask. ask not. But let us begin. •Ever since that late September afternoon in 1954, the never to be forgotten afternoon he had spent with Cassie watching Mays and Rhodes defeat the Indians, baseball had been a core obsession, and once he began playing in earnest the next year, he had proved to be surprisingly good at it, as good as the best players around him, strong in the field, strong at bat, with an innate feel for the nuances of any given situation during the course of a game, and when a person discovers he can do something well, he tends to want to keep doing it, to do it as often as he possibly can. •The second month at Camp Paradise was the month of the empty bed. The bare mattress on the metal springs to the right of where Ferguson continued to sleep, the bed of the now absent Noah, and every day Ferguson asked himself if they would ever see each other again. Cousins for a year and a half, and now cousins no more. an aunt who had married an uncle, and now married no more, with the uncle living on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, where he could no longer be with his boy. Everything solid for a time, and then the sun comes up one morning and the world begins to melt. •One afternoon, during the forty-five minute rest period that followed lunch, which was usually spent reading Superman comic books, writing letters, and studying two-day-old box scores in the New York Post, Dubinsky, whose bed stood to the left of Ferguson's (Noah's was to the right), brought up the old question once again, telling Ferguson how staunchly he had argued for Snider over Mantle in a discussion with two Yankee fans that morning, fully expecting Dodger-fan Ferguson to take his side, but Ferguson didn't do that, for as much as he worshipped the Duke, he said, Mantle was a better player, and on top of that Mays was even better than Mantle, only by a whisker, perhaps, but clearly better, and why would Dubinsky persist in deluding himself about the facts? Ferguson's answer was so unexpected, so tranquil in its assertions, so thorough in its demolition of Dubinsky's belief in the power of faith over reason that Dubinsky took offense, violent offense, and a moment later he was standing over Ferguson's bed and yelling at the top of his voice, calling Ferguson a traitor, an atheist, a communist, and a two-timing fraud, and maybe he should bash him in the gut to teach him a lesson. •There was no question that Uncle Don could be more loquacious than his father, funnier than his father, more interesting than his father, but only when he wanted to be, and now that Ferguson had come to know him as well as he did, he saw how often he seemed to look straight through Aunt Mildred when she talked to him, as if he were searching for something behind her back, not able to hear her because he was thinking about something else, which was not unlike how his father often looked at his mother now, more and more often now, the glazed-over look of a man unable to see anything but the thoughts inside his own head, a man who was there but not there, gone. •His mother looked agitated, more confused and distraught than Ferguson had ever seen her, no longer acting as the rock of composure and wisdom he had always thought she was but someone just like himself, a fragile being prey to sadness and tears and hopelessness, and when she put her arms around him he felt frightened, not just because his mother's store had burned down and there would be no more money for them to live on, which meant they would have to move to the poorhouse and subsist on porridge and dried-out pieces of bread for the rest of their days, no, that was bad enough, but the truly frightening thing was to learn that his mother was no stronger than he was, that the blows of the world hurt her just as much as they hurt him and that except for the fact that she was older, there was no difference between them. •After the festivities ended, however, as he and his parents were on their way home in the blue car, he was caught by surprise when his mother started bad-mouthing Uncle Lew to his father. He couldn't follow everything she said, but the anger in her voice was unusually harsh, a bitter harangue that seemed to have something to do  with his uncle owing his father money, and how dare Lew splurge on Cadillacs and mink coats before paying his father back. His father took it calmly at first, but then he raised his voice, which was something that almost never happened, and suddenly he was barking at Ferguson's mother to stop, telling her that Lew didn't owe him anything, that it was his brother's money and he could do anything he goddamned pleased with it. Ferguson knew his parents sometimes argued (he could hear their voices through the wall of their bedroom), but this was the first time they had fought a battle in front of him, and because it was the first time, he couldn't help feeling that something fundamental about the world had changed. •His mother had never cried in front of him before, and until he saw it with his own eyes, he hadn't even known that Mildred was capable of crying, but there they were weeping in front of him as they said goodbye to each other, both of them understanding that it could be months or years before they would see each other  again, and Ferguson saw it as he stood below them in his five-year-old's body, looking up at his mother and his aunt, stunned by the excess of emotion pouring out of them, and the image traveled to a place so deep inside him that he never forgot it. •He didn't like being talked to in that way, and he especially didn't like it when his uncle swatted him on the back of the head one Saturday afternoon because the sting had hurt so much he had cried, but now that he had overheard his mother say to his father that Uncle Arnold was a dope, Ferguson didn't really care anymore. •It was better to visit the Adler apartment in New York than the Ferguson houses in Union and Maplewood, not least because the drive through the Holland Tunnel was something he relished, the curious sensation of traveling through an underwater tube lined with millions of identical square tiles, and each time he made that subaquatic journey, he would marvel at how neatly the tiles fit together and wonder how many men it had taken to finish such a colossal task. •Mildred's help came in the form of a reading list, of several reading lists over the months that followed, and with movie theaters temporarily off-limits, for the first time in her life Rose satisfied her hunger for stories with novels, good novels, not the crime novels and bestsellers she might have gravitated to on her own but the books that Mildred recommended, classics to be sure, but always selected with Rose in mind, books that Mildred felt Rose would enjoy, which meant that Moby-Dick and Ulysses and The Magic Mountain were never on any of the lists, since those books would have been too daunting for the meagerly trained Rose, but how many others there were to choose from, and as the months passed and her baby grew inside her, Rose spent her days swimming in the pages of books, and although there were a few disappointments among the dozens she read (The Sun Also Rises, for example, which struck her as fake and shallow), nearly all the others lured her in and kept her engrossed from first to last, among them Tender Is The Night, Pride and Prejudice, The House of Mirth, Moll Flanders, Vanity Fair, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, The Charterhouse of Parma, First Love, Dubliners, Light in August, David Copperfield, Middlemarch, Washington Square, The Scarlet Letter, Main Street, Jane Eyre, and numerous others, but of all the writers she discovered during her confinement, it was Tolstoy who said the most to her, Tolstoy, who understood all of life, it seemed to her, everything there was to know about the human heart and the human mind, no matter if the heart or mind belonged to a man or a woman, and how was it possible, she wondered, for a man to know what Tolstoy knew about women, it made no sense that one man could be all men and all women, and therefore she marched through most of what Tolstoy had written, not just the big novels like War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection, but the shorter works as well, the novellas and stories, none more powerful to her than the one-hundred-page Family Happiness, the story of a young bride and her gradual disillusionment, a work that hit so close to home that she wept at the end, and when Stanley returned to the apartment that evening, he was alarmed to see her in such a state, for even though she had finished the story at three in the afternoon, her eyes were still wet with tears. •Because she was nervous herself, and because Stanley continued to sit there mostly in silence, she wound up talking for the two of them, which is to say, she talked too much, and as the minutes ticked by she grew more and more appalled with herself for rattling on like a brainless chatterbox, bragging about her sister, for example, and telling him what a brilliant student Mildred was, summa cum laude from Hunter last June and now enrolled in the graduate program at Columbia, the only woman in the English Department, one of only three Jews, imagine how proud the family was, and no sooner did she mention the family than she was on her way to Uncle Archie, her father's younger brother, Archie Adler, the keyboard man with the Downtown Quintet, currently playing at Moe's Hideout on fifty-second Street, and how inspiring it was to have a musician in the family, an artist, a renegade who thought about other things besides making money, yes she loved her Uncle Archie, he was far and away her favorite relative, and then, inevitably, she began talking about her work with Schneiderman, enumerating all the things he had taught her in the past year and a half, grump, foul-mouthed Schneiderman, who would take her to the Bowery on Sunday afternoons to hunt for old winos and bums, broken creatures with their white beards and long white hair, magnificent heads, the heads of ancient prophets and kings, and Schneiderman would give these men money to come to the studio to pose for him, in the most part in costumes, the old men dressed up in turbans and gowns and velvet robes, in the same way Rembrandt had dressed up the down-and-outs of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, and that was the light they used with these men, Rembrandt's light, light and dark together, deep shadow, all shadow with the merest touch of light, and by now Schneiderman had enough faith in her to allow her to set up the lighting on her own, she had made several dozen of these portraits by herself, and then she used the word chiaroscuro, and she understood that Stanley had no idea what she was talking about, that she could have been talking Japanese for all the sense it made to him, but still he went on looking at her, listening to her, rapt and silent, thunderstruck. •But by early June the southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways. •The old ones and their children weep for the gossamer mothers who have floated away. The children pray for their mothers to die. Such a kind and terrible wish. My sister and I allow it on the telephone. We cannot speak it looking one another in the eye. •The driver of the ambulette brings in a wheelchair. Mother lets herself be placed without a murmur, as though this happened every day. Amazed, we suddenly remember how to breathe. I fetch her doctor's order: “DNR — Do Not Resuscitate” off the kitchen wall. My hand bursts into flame. •When I talk to Mother, she looks vaguely at someone else, as though they were the speaker. But she gets jealous and sarcastic if two people talk and don't include her. What I do is: talk to another person but look at her. She is making converts to her ways. •Sometimes amidst her jungle of gibberish, Mother says, “Is everyone all right?” Or “Do you need any money?” Bless her! Even if it’s just mechanical: a phonograph needle dropped into one or two surviving grooves. •For awhile I reminded her what a wonderful mother, wife and teacher she had been. “Really?” she said, trying to find that person in the fog. Now those nouns are meaningless. So I can only tell her she is beautiful. Her beauty still matters to her most. For the first time, my sister and I are glad that this is so. •But that was the point—that was what gave her diary the power to make the nightmare real. To expect the great callous and indifferent world to care about the child of a pious, bearded father living under the sway of the rabbis and the rituals—that was pure folly. To the ordinary person with no great gift for tolerating even the smallest of differences the plight of that family wouldn’t mean a thing. To ordinary people it probably would seem that they had invited disaster by stubbornly repudiating everything modern and European—not to say Christian. But the family of Otto Frank, that would be another matter! How could even the most obtuse of the ordinary ignore what had been done to the Jews just for being Jews, how could even the most benighted of the Gentiles fail to get the idea when they read Het Achterhuis that once a year the Franks sang a harmless chanukah song, said some Hebrew words, lighted some candles, exchanged some presents—a ceremony lasting about ten minutes—and that was all it took to make them the enemy. •As for developing into a writer—she owed that not to any decision to sit down each day and try to be one but to their stifling life. That, of all things, seemed to have nurtured her talent! Truly, without the terror and the claustrophobia of the achterhuis, as a chatterbox surrounded by friends and rollicking with laughter, free to come and go, free to clown around, free to pursue her every last expectation, would she ever have written sentences so deft and so witty? •And this, I realized, is the excrutiating scrupulosity, the same maddening, meticulous attention to every last detail that makes you great, that keeps you going and got you through and now is dragging you down. Standing with E. I. Lonoff over the disobedient arm of his record player, I understood the celebrated phenomenon for the first time: a man, his destiny, and his work—all one. What a terrible triumph! •Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine—“You are the absolute love of my life,” he’d written in her last birthday card—and yet there was cement in her soul. •Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly. Philadelphia had the musty scent of history. New Haven smelled of neglect. Baltimore smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage. But Princeton had no smell. She liked taking deep breaths here. She liked watching the locals who drove with pointed courtesy and parked their latest-model cars outside the organic grocery store on Nassau Street or outside the sushi restaurants or outside the icecream shop that had fifty different flavors including red pepper or outside the post office where effusive staff bounded out to greet them at the entrance. She liked the campus, grave with knowledge, the Gothic buildings with their vine-laced walls, and the way everything transformed, in the half-light of night, into a ghostly scene. She liked, most of all, that in this place of affluent ease, she could pretend to be someone else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed American club, someone adorned with certainty. •Brian, redundant, would have time to write his novel, the great chronicle novel of the Northern working class. Brian would be forced, by redundancy, to confront the knowledge that time was not what he needed, Brian would turn sour. Already he had become unreasonable: later, he would, like everyone else, become sour. •It was boredom that had driven her to drugs and crime: and in her case, the crime had not been wholly in pursuit of the drugs, it had been embraced for its own sake. For thrills, for excitement, for a sense of being alive, for a momentary freedom from the tyranny of time. 'All my childhood,' Jilly had told Alix, 'I sat with my eyes on the clock, waiting for things to be over. Waiting for time to pass. Bored? I thought I'd die. I thought I'd die of boredom. And I mean die. I thought I'd just stop breathing, at the dinner table, in front of telly, in school prayers, in lessons. I used to play these games with myself — that I mustn't look at my watch or at the clock until I'd counted three hundred backwards, until my father had cleared his throat three times, until a cloud edged across the window pane, until the history teacher blew her nose — and then I'd look, and only a poxy five minutes would have passed. Five miserable minutes, out of a lifetime. And it just seemed so stupid — wrong, stupid — to spend the rest of my life waiting for time to pass. Glad when every day was over. Sorry when I woke up every morning. Relieved whenever a minute passed without my counting it out, second by second. What was wrong with me? I don't know. When I was high, time flew. And it was even better, breaking into the chemist's, breaking into corner shops. The excitement. Planning what to go for. Hiding in the dark. Listening out. Hearing one's heart beat. You know what I mean? •Her fears that the break-up of her marriage to Charles might portend a life of solitary, uninvited, ostracized, divorced neglect had not of course been fulfilled, but neither had they been wholly without foundation. •'Look,' said Esther, ' I don't know how to explain this, I know quite well that Claudio knows he hasn't seen a werewolf or spoken to a witch, but that so great is his power of — well, of what? of self-hallucination that he can persuade himself that he might have done? No, not even that. He knows he hasn't. But —' and Esther glanced at Liz in anxiety, in embarrassment, for never in all their years of close friendship had she ever made such a confession ' — the thing is, when I'm with Claudio, I find myself believing these things myself. It's as though I know I'd better believe them. that, when I'm with him, it's safer to believe them. Does that make any kind of sense at all? •She crosses to the sink, pours away her unwanted cup of instant coffee, washes the cup, washes a foil milk bottle top, puts her foot on the pedal bin, opens it, drops in the foil top, gazes absently for a moment at an empty egg box, an empty tomato tin, the scrapings of last night’s spaghetti, some apple peel, some kitchen roll, a browning lettuce leaf, a cigarette carton, a tonic bottle. She wishes they would not throw tonic bottles in the pedal bin: she likes to take them to the newly-provided Bottle Bank. She thinks of rescuing it, but does not. I don’t want to get too like Ma, she repeats to herself: but even as she rehearses these words, a strange, perverse, numbing respect for her mother seeps through her: how she has persisted, her mother, in being what she is, how stubbornly she has refused to divert herself with trivia, how bleakly and boldly she has stared over the years into the heart of nothingness. For it is trivial, it is all trivial, coffee mornings, eating, drinking, the National Theatre, shopping outings, reading books, embroidery, evening classes, country walks, wiping surfaces, emptying waste-paper baskets, Bond Street, Regent’s Park, saving bottles for the Bottle Bank, gardening, telephone calls, listening to the radio, Terry Wogan, going to the hairdresser, chatting to the window cleaner, giving small donations to Oxfam, throwing away silver foil, collecting silver foil, cleaning the bath. It is nothing, all of it. Sex and small children had provided a brief purpose, the energy they generated had made sense of the world for a while, had forged a pattern, a community: clinics, playgrounds, parks, nursery groups, mothers waiting at the school gate: and now: nothing. An idle flutter of garbage over an empty pavement. Coldness, nothingness, grips Shirley as she stands in her kitchen. She knows herself to be biologically dead. Her spirit shudders: she has seen a vision, of waste matter, of meaningless after-life, of refuse, of decay. An egg box and a tin can in blue and white plastic pedal bin. So might one stand forever. She lifts her foot. The lid drops. •He also tried to write the great pedestrian realistic working-class novel of the 1970s and 1980s, but he had moved to London, married a middle-class wife, and acquired too good an education to write what he wanted, as he wanted. •It is commonplace to hear middle-class people declare that they enjoy their jury service because it gives them an insight into how other people think and live. As though there were no other way of discovering these things. They enjoy the brief illusion of community, the sense of joint purpose. •She knew that despite their fondness for her, they were sure to find something almost satisfactory in watching her plunge and flounder and skitter off course — a plunging and floundering and skittering that their sharp, informed eyes could clearly detect, behind the confident public progress, the illusion of purpose, of direction. They knew quite well that Liz had lost purpose (momentarily, permanently, who could tell) and they were not wholly displeased. She had been too confident, too knowing, too rich: she had assumed privileges, she had lived in her own charmed world, had despised those who had been less certain, less secure. Let her taste confusion. •Alix was, at this stage, perhaps perversely, perhaps naturally, attracted by poverty. It seemed to her less alarming than it had seemed to her parents. She got on speaking terms with it. She discovered the art of sinking. She sank. Not very deep, but she sank. •They did not know then, were not to know for many years, were never fully to understand what it was that held them together — a sense of being on the margins of English life, perhaps, a sense of being outsiders, looking in from a cold street through a lighted window into a warm lit room that later might prove to be their own? •Of course they should divorce. She had often thought of it herself, had once or twice in low or high moments suggested it. But was nevertheless outraged, outraged, that the suggestion should have come from Charles. Had he meant it? Yes, he had meant it, she had no doubt. It was up to her, quickly, to forge herself a manner that would give her an advantage in whatever negotiations were to come: and she had done so by the time he came down for breakfast. •It was by her own choice that she sat here. It was by her own choice that she had married Cliff, in a field of cow parsley on a May evening. She had obeyed her body, she had opened her legs, had pulled him into her and said, Now, come, now. What was, what could have been wrong about that? She had thought to free herself, through nature, through the violence of nature. But nature was cunning and had kept her trapped. What did it want her for? She had obeyed sex, she had trusted sex, she had loved sex, and it had betrayed her, had deceived her, had left her sitting here, a middle-aged housewife, mother of three, playing cards, with nothing before her but old age. •She laid claim to the past—her version of the past—aggressively, as if retrieving misdirected mail. So this was where she came from. This all belonged to her, her birthright, like a pair of pearl earrings or a post office bond. X marks the spot, and Irie put an X on everything she found, collecting bits and pieces (birth certificates, maps, army reports, news articles) and storing them under the sofa, so that as if by osmosis the richness of them would pass through the fabric while she was sleeping and seep right into her. •As the front door closed behind her, Clara bit her own lip once more, this time in frustration and anger. Why had she said Captain Charlie Durham [was where she got her brains]? That was a downright lie. False as her own white teeth. Clara was smarter than Captain Charlie Curham. Hortense was smarter than Captain Charlie Durham. Probably even Grandma Ambrosia was smarter than Captain Charlie Durham. Captain Charlie Durham wasn’t smart. He had thought he was, but he wasn’t. He sacrificed a thousand people because he wanted to save one woman he never really knew. Captain Charlie Durham was a no-good djam fool bwoy. •Irie studied a small slice of the Chalfen family tree, an elaborate illustrated oak that stretched back to the 1600s and forward into the present day. The differences between the Chalfens and the Jones/Bowdens were immediately plain. For starters, in the Chalfen family everybody seemed to have a normal number of children. More to the point, everybody knew whose children were whose. The men lived longer than the women. The marriages were singular and log-lasting. Dates of birth and death were concrete. And the Chalfens actually knew who they were in 1675. Archie Jones could give no longer record of his family than his father’s own haphazard appearance on the planet in the back room of a Bromley public house circa 1895 or 1896 or quite possibly 1897, depending on which nonagenarian ex-barmaid you spoke to. Clara Bowden knew a little about her grandmother, and half-believed the story that her famed and prolific Uncle P. had thirty-four children, but could only state definitively that her own mother was born at 2:45 P.M. on January 14, 1907, in a Catholic church in the middle of the Kingston earthquake. The rest was rumor, folktale and myth. •This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. •The school had learned to its cost that you cannot unite a thousand children under one Latin tag (school code: Laborare est Orare, To Labor is to Pray); kids are like pissing cats or burrowing moles, marking off land within land, each section with its own rules, beliefs, laws of engagement. Despite every attempt to suppress it, the school contained and sustained patches, hangouts, disputed territories, satellite states, states of emergency, ghettos, enclaves, islands. There were no maps, but common sense told you, for example, not to fuck with the area between the garbage cans and the craft department. There had been casualties there. •Often you see old men in the corner of dark pubs, discussing and gesticulating, using beer mugs and salt cellars to represent long-dead people and far-off places. At that moment they display a vitality missing in every other area of their lives. They light up. Unpacking a full story onto the table—here is a Churchill-fork, over there is a Czechoslovakia-napkin, here we find the accumulation of German troops represented by a collection of cold peas—they are reborn. •Something to rationalize, to explain, why one would keep returning, like Freud’s grandson with his fort-da game, to the same miserable scenario. But time is what it comes down to. After you’ve spent a certain amount, invested so much of it in one place, your credit rating booms and you feel like breaking the chronological bank. You feel like staying in the place until it pays you back all the time you gave it—even if it never will. •Irie, looking strangely like the crowd on top of the wall in her everyday garb of CND badges, graffiti-covered trousers, and beaded hair, shook her head in saddened disbelief. She was that age. Whatever she said burst like genius into centuries of silence. Whatever she touched was the first stroke of its kind. Whatever she believed was not formed by faith but carved from certainty. Whatever she thought was the first time such a thought had ever been thunk. •For six days and six nights Alsana did not know, was not sure. During this period she read extensively from the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore and tried hard to believe his assurances (Night’s darkness is a bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn), but she was, at heart, a practical woman and found poetry no comfort. •“Where I come from,” said Archie, “a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her.” “Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean,” said Samad tersely, “that it is a good idea.” •They knocked around ideas that Archie did not entirely understand, and Samad offered secrets into the cool night that he had never spoken out loud. Long, comfortable silences passed between them like those between women who have known each other for years. They looked out onto stars that lit up unknown country, but neither man clung particularly to home. In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can only make on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue. •“But Auntie,” begs Neena, raising her voice, because this is what she really wants to argue about, the largest sticking point between the two of them, Alsana’s arranged marriage. “How can you bear to live with somebody you don’t know from Adam?” In response, an infuriating wink: Alsana always likes to appear jovial at the very moment her interlocutor becomes hot under the collar. “Because, Miss Smarty-pants, it is by far the easiest option. It was exactly because Eve did not know Adam from Adam that they got on so A-OK. Let me explain. Yes, I was married to Samad Iqbal the same evening of the very day I met him. Yes, I didn’t know him from Adam. But I liked him well enough. We met in the breakfast room on a steaming Delhi day and he fanned me with The Times. I thought he had a good face, a sweet voice, and his backside was high and well-formed for a man of his age. Very good. Now, every time I learn something more about him, I like him less. So you see, we were better off the way we were. •He thought of his wife, Alsana, who was not as meek as he had assumed when they married, to whom he must deliver the bad news; Alsana, who was prone to moments, even fits—yes, fits was not too strong a word—of rage. Cousins, aunts, brothers thought it a bad sign, they worried if there wasn’t  some “funny mental history” in Alsana’s family, they sympathized with him the way you sympathize with a man who has bought a stolen car with more mileage on it than first thought. •“Cousin!” said Ardashir, with a friendly grimace at the sight of Samad’s body curling cautiously around the door. He knew that Samad had come to inquire about a pay increase, and he wanted his cousin to feel that he had at least considered the case in all his friendly judiciousness before he declined. •At the traffic lights he flipped a ten-pence coin and smiled when the result seemed to agree that Fate was pulling him toward another life. Like a dog on a leash round a corner. Generally, women can’t do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable. In this manner, a new Archie is about to emerge. We have caught him on the hop. For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood. He is in a maybe this, maybe that kind of mood. When he approaches a forked road, he slows down, checks his undistinguished face in the rearview mirror, and quite indiscriminately chooses a route he’s never taken before, a residential street leading to a place called Queen’s Park. Go straight past Go!, Archie-boy, he tells himself; collect two hundred, and don’t for Gawd’s sake look back. •Strangely, Daria was the final pulse of thought that passed through Archie just before he blacked out. It was the thought of a whore he met once twenty years ago, it was Daria and her smile that made him cover Mo’s apron with tears of joy as the butcher saved his life. He had seen her in his mind: a beautiful woman in a doorway with a come-hither look; and he realized he regretted not coming hither. If there was any chance of ever seeing a look like that again, then he wanted the second chance, he wanted the extra time. •This is worse than the Matterhorn, were you ever on the Matterhorn, Miss Fitt, great honeymoon resort. •A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclination to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as they should. The air temperature was appropriate relative to the annual mean temperature and to the aperiodic monthly fluctuations of the temperature. The rising and setting of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn, and many other significant phenomena were all in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The water vapor in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the humidity was minimal. In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August 1913. •I think revenge must be good. The Greeks knew—how blood calls out for blood. I think it must be inborn, in our genes, the instinct for ‘justice’. The need to restore balance. •In one of the patches of waiting that were like pleats in time, while Corinne remained at their father’s bedside in case he should wake, Marianne and Judd, faint with hunger, had a quick meal in the hospital cafeteria; and afterward, grateful for each other’s company like old friends who’d somehow forgotten how much they liked each other, went outside to walk for a half hour in the bright windy autumn air. •Corinne had begun to cry silently, in that way that Marianne recalled for the first time in years: a mother’s crying, stifled, soundless, secret so as to not disturb. If you cried so others could hear you were crying to be head but a mother’s crying was just the opposite, crying not to be heard. •“It’s just that he loses control sometimes. As soon as he gets the business established again, and gets back to work, you know how he loves to work, he’ll be fine. The drinking is only temporary—it’s like medicine for him, like he has a terrible headache and needs to anesthetize himself, you can sympathize with that, Judd, can’t you? We might be the same way in his place. He’s a good, decent man who only wants to provide for his family. He’s told me how sorry he is, and he’d tell you except—well, you know how he is, how men are. He loves you no matter what he says or does, you know that don’t you? •They say the youngest kid of a family doesn’t remember himself very clearly because he has learned to rely on the memories of others, who are older and thus possess authority. Where his memory conflicts with theirs, it’s discarded as of little worth. What he believes to be his memory is more accurately described as a rag-bin of others’ memories, their overlapping testimonies of things that happened before his birth, including him. so it wasn’t a smart-ass remark, I don’t know what I know. It was just the truth. •Most of the Co-op members, male and female, from the youngest who was eighteen to the eldest who was in his thirties, complained of home. It was fashionable among the Kilburn College students generally, Marianne noted, to complain of home, family. Her professors made witty jokes about “domestic American rituals”—Thanksgiving, Christmas gift-giving, family summer vacations—in such knowing ways, everyone in class laughed; or almost everyone. Marianne perceived that to be without a family in America is to be deprived not just of that family but of an entire arsenal of allusive material as cohesive as algae covering a pond. •The terrifying possibility came to Patrick: our lives are not our own but in the possession of others, our parents. Our lives are defined by the whims, caprices, cruelties of others. That genetic web, the ties of blood. It was the oldest curse, older than God. Am I loved? Am I wanted? Who will want me, if my parents don’t? •Of course he knew beauty doesn’t exist. He hadn’t known then but he knew now. Beauty is a matter of perspective, subjectivity. Cultural prejudice. You require a human eye, a human brain, a human vocabulary. In nature, there’s nothing. Still beauty gives comfort. Who knows why? •A cruel counterthought mocked No, you’re just afraid of what you might discover. •In a flash it came to her: of course she’d known something had been wrong with her daughter, these past few days. Something not-right. Since Sunday. Since the telephone call. A mother always knows, can’t not know. But Corinne had been so busy, hadn’t gotten around to investigating. And hadn’t she always been proud she wasn’t the kind of mother to “investigate”—on principle. I want my children to trust me. To think of me as an equal. •Corinne tried one of the heavy doors, cautiously—it opened. Her heart was beating painfully. She stepped inside the dim-lit vestibule and a sweet-rancid odor made her nostrils pinch. Incense. An undercurrent of mildew. That unmistakable smell of so-aged-it-can’t-really-be-cleaned-any-longer linoleum tile. As if rehearsing a way in which to speak of this adventure, a way of most artfully recounting it to make her listeners laugh, Corinne thought Why, you know right away it isn’t one of our churches, it’s one of theirs! •So Corinne was a new mother: slightly touched by new-mother craziness. She hoped to dignify herself by commenting sagely to the doctor (always, you want to impress them: men of authority) about “the sucking reflex”—“the bonding instinct”—and similar clinical-anthropological phenomena. She wanted to impress this man she hardly knew, she’d been a college student after all, even if she was only at Fredonia State, and she’d dropped out between her junior and senior years to get married. •Was she invincible? She wondered if she was guided by some higher power. Was her mission, avoiding Carl, leaving civilization, a holy one? There was no other answer. •I can take dictation at the rate of a hundred words a minute. I am willing to work. Will you let me try it? I am looking for a position as a cashier. This is to certify that Mabel Howard has been in my employ for fifteen months. She is a most able and willing worker. Merry Christmas to you and all the family. May each of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the new year be a happy one for you. May your Easter be a bright and happy one. Birthday greetings. You have our heartfelt sympathy. Heartiest congratulations. •His thoughts and the thoughts of others were constantly on what he would achieve, on what he would become, in a pleasantly anticipated future, while the present lay just at hand, all the riches of the world ignored and untouched. It was scarcely Michael's fault. I could see that his clever childhood had been a grooming, an anticipation, for the future use of his many talents, and he had fallen into the habit of tomorrow which in a man of thirty-three shows a rosy promise beginning to wither and arouses pity rather than admiration. •Everything is always comparative in another country. Crooks are crookeder, grass is greener, heights are higher, words are wordier, pleasures are more pleasurable, death is deader, life is livelier, dogs are doggier, fortune is more fortunate, vaults more vaulted, distance is further, water more watery, blue is bluer, grey is greyer, fame more famous, continuance more continuing, consumers more consumed, reality more real, fantasy more fantastic, adjustments more adjusted, fires more fiery, chaos more chaotic... I mean to say... •I quite enjoy these detective stories. There's an art in them, you know. (He was defensive.) •What neither of them said was that when you plan to retire, to get to the country of perpetual relaxation, and you start travelling there and eventually arrive you may find you have picked up a perpetual sense of despair and a feeling of timelessness that is not merely the abandoning of timetables and not the grand eternity 'pinnacled dim in the intense inane', but a prospect of desert, of fruitlessness from which death begins to appear, enticingly, as the last springtime. •Everywhere, every year there is weather described as unusual, not by the visitors but by those who know best, the inhabitants. •Have you sensed the nothingness of my nature, that I am as empty as the carriages of the trains that pass, dusty, used, in the morning sun? A novelist must be that way, I think, and not complain of it, otherwise how shall the characters accommodate themselves in his mind? •The library performed a similar function to the English church—it gathered together the exiles who had left England partly because they did not wish to be gathered together but who had changed their mind once they had arrived on the Côte d'Azur, settled in their retirement homes or apartments, redecorated and furnished the interior, cleaned up and planted the garden, and then sitting back to enjoy the arrival of the long-anticipated time for living, found that it was late, or it had been and gone, or it was only a dream. •When three hours had passed Dorset's voice was very loud, Elizabeth's too, and Elizabeth began to talk of Rose and how she and Rose had both written poems while they were young and hers, Elizabeth's, were longer with more words and had more titles. •Menton is a city of innumerable retirement dreams quietly being wrecked by reality. The lizard ideal of sun and warmth, the human ideal of unlimited leisure, of unbroken views of ocean, sky, mountains, trees, make Menton a promised paradise for all when reaching their troisième âge they try to follow the tradition of stopping suddenly their pursuits of twenty, thirty, forty years. •What a dreary life an author's life is, I thought. •Grace, in this family setting, was the tolerated outsider whose slightest false move would change her to the enemy; the seeds of enmity had been planted with her arrival as Michael's unofficial wife but the rain- and sun-making forces necessary for their growth had been imprisoned within the seasonless weatherless world of the parents' love for or indulgence of their son. •When she spoke, French or English, she spoke slowly, almost mechanically, with a swaying motion of her body as if she had within her some instrument for winding her words, in sentence-containers, up from a great depth where they had fallen or been banished; sometimes one felt as if they were extracted with difficulty, as if she herself had gone away down into the rock to hack them out and shake them clean—a long slow process which made her listeners impatient: usually Max or Michael took over the telling of a long story when the words appeared to fit it appeared to be growing scarce. •...perhaps reliving that same kind of afternoon when she (the old maid, his sister—and more than his sister: the woman (she was more than fifteen years older than he) who had brought him up and nursed him and virtually held him in her arms until he could stand up by himself), when she had appeared, carried by that same seven o’clock train, although then composed of an assortment of irregular cars in which she had travelled—or rather lived—for three days and three nights, with this difference, too, that it wasn’t seven but around three in the afternoon, and that it was the train from the day before arriving around twenty hours late, or today’s train four hours ahead of time, or perhaps even tomorrow’s and even the day after’s train with, in that case, a huge supply of hours ahead of time, for after this one and for almost a week, no other train came through •From here, at least, nothing more could be heard. Through the trees the car was still visible on the top of the rise, and, to the left, the window with the closed shutters behind which the old woman was dying, motionless in her solitary bed, the sheet which was drawn up to her chin rising and falling with the regular rhythm of that continuous, calm and terrible rattle escaping from her lungs like the monstrous respiration of a giant, some playful mythological creature which had chosen its residence in the frail body of this woman in her death agony, so that these slow and interminable bellows could be heard like the trumpets of the Last Judgement,—dying, diligently dying, concentrated, focussed (solitary, arrogant and terrible) on the action of dying, in the dimness of the room where the summer’s powdery light penetrated only through the slit between the two closed shutters: a T whose crosspiece, shaped like a thin triangle lying base upward, corresponded to the interval between the top of the shutters and the window frame, and which slowly shifted from right to left, somewhat distended toward noon, then again diagonally lengthened again, all between morning and evening: like the initial of the word Time, an impalpable and stubborn letter trailing in the moribund odor, the stale and moribund fragrance hanging in the air: the smell of cheap eau de cologne the nurse bathed her in, and that ineffable, obsolete and ashen odor of faded bouquets which seems to float forever in the rooms of old ladies, around mirrors reflecting their worn faces, like the discreet, fragile, slightly rancid exhalation of faded days... •“...And now she’s going to die, and there’ll be nothing left.” (the voice stopping suddenly breaking off, and Louise standing there, panting a little, as if surprised, furious at having talked so much, still staring at whatever it was that he couldn’t see—that he knew he couldn’t see, that he wouldn’t see, even if he turned around, staring in his turn over his shoulder in the direction where whatever it was seemed to be... •“No,” she repeated submissively. But she continued looking at something in front of her which he could not see. ...“Then nothing,” she said (still staring through the trees, across the fields of that calm September landscape, at whatever it was that he could not see). “Nothing:...” •But she has nothing, nobody, and no-one will mourn for her... •She mused over the word mine. What a funny word for the extraction of precious metals from the earth: mine. She thought she would tell her kids her thoughts on this, the very funny confluence of the meanings of mine and mine, and then found herself whispering the words, mine mine mine, and noticed she was smiling. She was far gone. •The diner was in full swing. Josie was in her flannel shirt, so she was invisible and enjoying a second glass of chardonnay. •She could drive all night, she decided. She could pull over anywhere. It didn't matter. She was free and her children were safe. She felt powerful, capable, heroic as she had when they'd left the bed and breakfast. She wanted a drink. •Coast to coast, most Americans would not be sure that war was still on, that we were still there, that men and women like Jeremy were still fighting and dying, that Afghans were still fighting and dying too. •In the relentless morning sun Josie drove, exhausted and angry and tired of watching the bottle break across her face, but knowing she deserved it. What kind of person takes it from behind in a trailer park, with her children sleeping mere feet away? •"Eight thirty," Josie said, because she knew it was probably true. "Thanks," the man said, but in a way that implied he was a paying guest and she was some kind of bike-path clock keeper—that she worked on the path and was in charge of time. She thought of the bicycle man in her town, the one responsible for the maiming, the furious and florid sense of themselves these men felt. I am wearing these clothes and have gone fast. Move from my path. Fix my teeth. Tell me the time. •The purple wildflowers, the grey dirt, the smell of the pine needles cooling. The tall trees halved by lightning. The waning sun on the hills in the distance, bright blue and white. Whose bike was she riding anyway? A log-hewn fence. The wail of a far-away truck slowing. The monotony of an unburned forest on the sun-drenched hillside. Why did she have to be tipsy before she could notice anything? •To be described is to be seduced. Shit. One turn of phrase. One thing noticed that she'd never noticed. It worked always. •He understood that she'd spent the day wondering why she hadn't had happiness like this, Jesus Christ why had she made all the wrong decisions, these stupid teenagers getting married knew how to have a beautiful and humble wedding by this Alaskan river, goddamnit, why did she make it all so difficult when it could be so simple? •As a teen, during the worst years of Candyland, she'd been though a very long few years of aloneness, a brutal and wonderful and terrible time of luxuriating in her tortured mind, her suddenly heavy thighs, her growing nose, the rumors about her parents, the word Rosemont on everyone's tongues, always implicating her parents, her feeling of being horrified at being alone on weekend nights but not wanting to be among people, either. •This was the march of civilization. First there is barbarism, no schools at all, all learning done at home, chaotically if at all. Then there is civil society, democracy, the right to free schooling for every child. Close on the heels of the right to free education is the right to pull these children out of the free schools and put them in private-schools—we have a right to pay for what is provided for free! And this is followed, inevitably and petulantly, by the right to pull them from school altogether to do it yourself at home, everything coming full circle. •Twenty-two years of struggle for what—your child sits inside at an Ikea table staring into a screen while outside the sky changes, the sun rises and falls, hawks float like zeppelins. This was the common criminal pursuit of all contemporary humankind. Give my child an Ikea desk and twelve hours a day of sedentary typing. This will mean success for me, them, our family, our lineage. She would not pursue this. She would not subject her children to this. They would not seek these specious things, no. It was only about making them loved in a moment in the sun. •"Dishes stacked in the sink..." Carl now said—he seemed to have given up the pretense of the key—and he made a tsk sound, like some grandmother from the fifties. And why are the dishes in the sink the universal emblem of domestic squalor and parental failure? Is it the stacking? Dishes shouldn't be stacked—was that the conclusion? Or is it that they're in the sink? It's okay that they're stacked, but not in the sink? Should they be stacked elsewhere? In a closet, on the bed? •Child support was never discussed or contemplated. For six months he wasn't seen at all. But when he reappeared, he acted like he'd been there all the while. "Are you sure about this school they're in?" he'd asked last fall, the last time he'd visited. "Are they being fully challenged?" •Any given year you should expect certain things. You can expect to see some horrifying act of terror, for example. A new beheading of a man in orange is a shock and will make you want to never leave the house, but not if you have budgeted for it. A new mass shooting in a mall or school can cripple you for a day but not if you've budgeted for it. That's this month's shooting, you can say. And if there isn't a shooting that month, all the better. You've come out ahead on the ledger. You have a surplus. A refund. •The crime of the ponytail ladies was that they were always in a hurry, in a hurry to exercise, in a hurry to pick up their children from capoeira, in a hurry to examine the scores from the school's Mandarin-immersion program, in a hurry to buy micro-greens at the new ivy-covered organic grocery, one of a newly dominant national chain begun by a libertarian megalomaniac, a store where the food had been curated, in which the women in their ponytails rushed quickly through, smiling viciously when their carts' paths were momentarily waylaid. •That was the primary response she provoked in others: disappointment. Her employees were disappointed in their hours and pay, her patients were disappointed in their care, in their cavities, in the fact of their dirty mouths, their soft teeth, in their slippery insurance plans. The suggestion box, the staff's idea, had been a disaster. Kinda disappointed. Very disappointed. Super disappointed. She put away the box, had a few happy years, then the customer-review websites appeared, jesus, so many aggrieved, all these anonymous patients avenging her every slip, every imperfect moment. Disappointment in her bedside manner. Disappointment in the diagnosis. Disappointed in the magazines in the waiting room. Every disappointment a crime. •Back home Josie was so tired, so bone-weary of spending money. It crushed the spirit. •These were the breed of people who had overtaken Josie's town, had overtaken the kids' school. No one seemed to work; everyone had matching lycra and found time to be at every one of the three or four hundred yearly events at school. How could someone like Josie have a job, be a mother, and yet not be a failure, a pariah, at this average school in this average town? •There is proud happiness, happiness born of doing good work in the light of day, years of worthwhile labor, and afterwards being tired, and content, and surrounded by family and friends, bathed in satisfaction and ready for a deserved rest—sleep or death, it would not matter. Then there is the happiness of one's personal slum. The happiness of being alone, and tipsy on red wine, in the passenger seat of an ancient recreational vehicle parked somewhere in Alaska's deep south, staring into a scribble of black trees, afraid to go to sleep for fear that at any moment someone will get past the toy lock on the RV door and murder you and your two small children sleeping above. •José Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he’d drowned. He knew this was one of the many ways the General meditated, but the ecstasy in which he lay drifting seemed that of a man no longer of this world. •unite for life in stoic love to the last shrimp and a little longer •He’s a little old man we’re two little old men something wrong here •I’ll never have a past never had •“The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down” (they join in wild laughter). •All day the same old record. All alone in that great empty house. She must be a very old woman now. •It’s like the sparrows, than many of which we are of more value, they weren’t sparrows at all. You exaggerate. They weren’t sparrows at all! Does that put our price up? •Rotting leaves in June. From last year, and from the year before last, and from the year before that again. •I have forgotten what way I am facing. You have turned aside and are bowed down over the ditch. •You lie awake at night, tossing to and fro and brooding on it (and other wretchedness). •The only thing wrong with her as far as he could see was that she was dying. •It is a help sometimes to get up and pace to and fro between the seats, like a caged beast. •I did not care. I just sat on, saying, If this train were never to move again, I should not greatly mind. •Things are very dull today, I said, nobody going down, nobody getting on. Then as time flew by and nothing happened, I realized my error. We had not entered a station. •Where was I in my composition? At a standstill. •Oh, the pretty little woolly lamb, crying to suck its mother! •One would think you were struggling with a dead language. [I know full well what you mean], I often have that feeling, it is unspeakable excruciating. I confess I have it myself sometimes, when I happen to overhear what I am saying. •On the other hand, I said, these are the horrors of home life, the dusting, sweeping, airing, scrubbing, waxing, waning, washing, mangling, drying, mowing, clipping, raking, rolling, scuffling, shoveling, grinding, tearing, pounding, banging and slamming. And the brats, the happy hearty little howling neighbour’s brats. Of all this and much more the weekend, the Saturday intermission and then the day of rest, have given you some idea. But what must it be like on a working day? A Wednesday? A Friday! And I fell to thinking of my silent, back-street, basement office, with its obliterated plate, rest couch and velvet hangings, and what it means to be buried there alive, if only from ten to five, with convenient to the one hand a bottle of light pale ale and to the other a long ice-cold fillet of hake. Nothing, I said, not even fully certified death, can ever take the place of that. It was then I noticed we were at a standstill. •I dream of other roads, in other lands. Of another  home. •We drew out in the tick of time, I can vouch for that. •If I could go deaf and dumb I think I might pant on to be a hundred. •Just concentrate on putting one foot before the next or whatever that expression is. •Sit at home on the remnants of my bottom counting the hours - till the next meal. The very thought puts life in me! •Just cling to me and all will be well. •I have been up and down these steps five thousand times and still I do not know how many there are. •I think Effie is going to commit adultery with the Major. •We shall fall into the ditch. Oh! It will be like old times! •My birthday? Don’t you remember? I wished you your happy returns in the bathroom. •Kiss you? In public? On the platform? Before the boy? Have you taken leave of your senses? •I do think we are owed some explanation, if only to set our minds at rest. •I quite agree, we are better here, in the shadow of the waiting room. •A collision! Oh that would be wonderful! •What terrible thing has happened? •The cruel fact remains that the twelve thirty has not yet arrived (Oh darling mother!) •Do not flatter yourselves for one moment, because I hold aloof, that my sufferings have ceased. •Do not imagine, because I am silent, that I am not present, and alive, to all that is going on. •I am sorry for all this randam. •That will do, just prop me up against the wall like a roll of tarpaulin and that will be all for the moment. •That is a nice way to treat your defenceless subordinates, hitting them without warning in the pitt of the stomach. •It is the Protestant thing to do (give me your arm). Pismires do it for one another. I have seen slugs do it. [Miss Fitt proffers her arm]. •Maddy Rooney, née Dunne, the big pale blur. You have piercing sight, Miss Fitt, if only you knew it, literally piercing. •I start eating my doily instead of thin bread and butter. •I stumble in a daze as you might say, oblivious to my coreligionists. •Mr Barrell (testily). What is it, Mrs. Rooney, I have my work to do. •There was a moment there, I remember now, I was so plunged in sorrow I wouldn’t have heard a steam roller go over me. •No coughing or spitting or bleeding or vomiting, just drifting gently down into the higher life. •Would I were lying stretched out in my comfortable bed, just wasting painlessly away, keeping up my strength with arrowroot and calves-foot jelly, till in the end you wouldn’t see me under the blankets any more than a board. •Crouch down! At my time of life! This is lunacy! •Don’t mind me. Don’t take any notice of me. I do not exist. The fact is well known. •One minute picking happy at the dung, on the road, in the sun, with now and then a dust bath, and then -- bang! - all her troubles over. •Oh, mother, you’ve squashed her, drive on, drive on! •My nice frock! Look what you’ve done to my frock! •Suppose I do get up? Will I ever get down? •Come back and unlace me behind the hedge! •What kind of a country is this where a woman can’t weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers! •In her forties now she’d be, I don’t know, fifty, girding up her lovely little loins, getting ready for the change... •Speak for yourself. I am not alive nor anything approaching it. •In spite of all it is a blessed thing to be alive in such weather, and out of hospital. •Let us wait for a minute and this vile dust fall back upon viler worms. •I saved his life once. I have not forgotten it. •Are we very late? I have not the courage to look at my watch. •The back! The chain! The oil! The grease! The hub! The brakes! The gear! No! It is too much! •It is suicide to be abroad. But what is it to be at home? A lingering dissolution. •Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher’s regular. What normal woman wants affection? •Oh I am just a hysterical old hag I know, destroyed with sorrow and pining and gentility and church-going and fat and rheumatism and childlessness. •Oh let me just flop down flat on the road like a big flat jelly out of a bowl and never move again! A great big slop thick with grit and dust and flies, they would have to scoop me up with a shovel. •Why do you not climb up on the crest of your manure and let yourself be carried along? •Poor woman. All alone in that ruinous old house. •The loneliness of this country and the impermanence of the people who huddle on a land that belongs only to itself. •She knew it had been the fifteenth because she had arrived in Washington on the fifteenth of August and given herself a month to find a house and put Catherine into school and get the raise that meant she was no longer a provisional hire (there again a survivor, there again that single-minded efficiency), and at the moment her father called she had just made a note to ask about the raise. •You will notice that participants in disasters typically locate the "beginning" of a disaster at a point suggesting their own control over events. A plane crash retold will not begin with the pressure system over the Central Pacific that caused the instability over the Gulf that caused the wind shear at DFW but at some manageable human intersect, with for example the "funny feeling" ignored at breakfast. An account of a 6.8 earthquake will not begin with the overlap of the tectonic plates but more comfortably, at the place in London where we ordered the Spode that shattered the morning the tectonic plates shifted. Had we just gone with the funny feeling. Had we just never ordered the Spode. We all prefer the magical explanation. •If I could believe (as convention tells us) that character is destiny and the past prologue et cetera, I might begin the story of what happened to Elena McMahon during the summer of 1984 at some earlier point. •He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. •But there was Jordan beside me who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. •The story of my life does not exist. Does not exist. There’s never been any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one. •‘How,’ Jones asked Martin, ‘are things with your father?’ Martin shrugged and told him. •‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ said the priest, ‘I’m just pointing out the various opinions that exist on the matter. You mustn’t pay too much attention to opinions. The text is immutable, and the opinions are often only an expression of despair over it…’ •Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November, 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the masthead ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon: Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer ‘Yes’; if we are truthful we say ‘No’; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us—a piece of a policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil—but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen, on a line in a gale of wind. •When de long, cold———Oh, I tells you, breddren, when de long cold. . . I sees de light en I sees de word, po sinner! Dey passed away in Egypt, de swingin chariots; de generations passed away. Wus a rich man: whar he now, O breddren? Wus a po man: whar he now, O sistuhn? Oh I tells you, ef you aint got de milk en de dew of de old salvation when de long, cold years roll away! •Incredible the first animal that dreamed of another animal. Monstrous the first vertebrae that succeeded in standing on two feet and thus spread terror among the beasts still normally and happily crawling close to the ground through the slime of creation. Astounding the first telephone call, the first boiling water, the first song, the first loincloth. •Sometimes I think everything I’ve done those years, everything around me in fact, I don’t know if you feel this way but everything is vaguely—what—fictitious. •She thinks she longs for rest, a carefree afternoon to decide suddenly to go to the pictures, or just to sit with the birdcages and listen to the children play in snow. This notion of rest, it’s attractive to her, but I don’t think she would like it. They are all like that, these women. Waiting for the ease, the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts. But they wouldn’t like it. They are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down. No fields of cowslips will rush into that opening, nor morning free of flies and heat when the sky is shy. No. Not at all. They fill their minds with soap and repair and dicey confrontations because what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle moment, is the seep of rage. Molten. Thick and slow-moving. Mindful and particular about what in its path it chooses to bury. Or else, into a beat of time, and sideways under their breasts, slips a sorrow they don’t know where from. •Her face is wasted away so that the bones draw just under the skin in white lines. Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks. But the eternal and the everlasting salvation and grace is not upon her. •For some time now he had felt the need to urinate, but he did not get up. Until last night he would have hopped out of bed and gone in the can in the corner of his cell. But now he was daunted at the thought of walking down the hall to a room marked by a wooden sign bearing the letters WC. The realization that he could open the door of his own free will and walk to the toilet without being watched by a guard filled him with something approaching terror. •Opinions vary as to whether the doorkeeper intends the announcement that he is going to shut the gate merely as an answer, or to emphasize his devotion to duty, or because he wants to arouse remorse and sorrow in the man at the last moment. •‘…No,’ said the priest, ‘you don’t have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary.’ •K. knew clearly now that it was his duty to seize the knife as it floated from hand to hand above him and plunge it into himself. But he didn’t do so. •Things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can sweep up in half an hour. •And this is the other thing they shared, the sadness and clarity of time, time mourned in the music—how the sound, the shaped vibrations made by hammers striking wire strings made them feel an old sorrow not for particular things but for time itself, the material feel of a year or an age, the textures of unmeasured time that were lost to them now, and she turned away, looking past her lifted hand into some transparent thing he thought he could call her life.     •He wants me to go to the zoo because the animals are real. I told him these are zoo animals. These are animals that live in the Bronx. On television I can see animals in the rain forest or the desert. So which is real and which is fake, which made him laugh. •To his surprise, Brian did not reject this theory. He didn’t necessarily believe it but he didn’t dismiss it either. He believed it provisionally here in this room located below street level in a framehouse on a weekday afternoon in Cliffside park, New Jersey. It was lyrically true as it emerged from Marvin Lundy’s mouth and reached Brian’s middle ear, unprovably true, remotely and inadmissably true but not completely unhistorical, not without some nuance of authentic inner narrative. •In the dark he thinks about the game. The game comes rolling over him in a great warm wave of contented sleep. The game was lost and then they won. The game could not be won but they won it and it’s won forever. This is the thing they can never take away. It is the first thing he will think of in the morning and one part of him is already there even as he falls asleep, waking up to think about the game. •This is a terrible moment, one of those times when Cotter realizes he has won a struggle he didn’t know was taking place. He has beat his father into surrender, into awful withdrawal. •She looked at me and walked out of the room. I heard the shower running across the hall and I realized I’d done it all wrong. I should have brought up the subject standing in the doorway while she was watching TV. Then I could have been the one who walks out of the room. •I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions... You maintain a shifting distance between yourself and your job. There’s a sort of self-conscious space, a  sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat... but it’s not that you’re pretending to be someone else. You’re pretending to be exactly who you are. •Famous people don’t want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there’s something crawling in their clothes. •It’s the special skill of the adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent. •He went out to get a pack of cigarettes and never came back. This is a thing you used to hear about disappearing men. It’s the final family mystery. All the mysteries of the family reach their culmination in the final passion of abandonment. •...the way people modelled themselves on someone else, a few people, it’s only natural, mostly mimicking up, repeating a superior’s gestures or expressions. •A man sat in a corner chair in a living room set with a coffee table in front of him and books or covers of books arrayed on the wall behind. •I lived responsibly in the real. I didn’t accept this business of life as a fiction, or whatever Klara Sax had meant when she said that things had become unreal. History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood—read the speeches of Mussolini—at least we’ve known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation. •I watched TV in my motel. •I found the more she talked the more she owed me. But I didn’t say a word. •Broad and open like a summer waitress who says there you go when she deposits the food in front of you. •He realized he’d forgotten to give his dad two glasses of water to take with the yellow and blue capsule despite the bold-faced reminder on the prescription bottle. These little failures ate away at his confidence even when he knew it was not his father’s fault for not managing his own intake or his mother’s for not being around when she was needed. There were constant little wars of whose fault is it and okay I’m sorry and I wish he’d die and get it over with, all taking place in Richard’s inner mind.