"He would have cooked it himself but for my mother’s complete conviction that she was the only person in our house who would tell a saucepan from a piano."
" ....she’d do what most people do when confronted with something they don’t understand: Panic. What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in an usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt)."
"It meant that to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist."
" ‘The Lord walked on the water,’ was all she said when I tried to explain. But she had her own problems. A lot of the missionaries had been eaten, which meant she had to explain to their families. ‘It’s not easy,’ she said, ‘even though it’s for the Lord.’ "
"Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one."
"There are women in the world. There are men in the world. And there are beasts. What do you do if you marry a beast?"
"When I married, I laughed for a week, cried for a month, and settled down for life."
"Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently."
"Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way."
"People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos will burn, and memory, what is that? The imperfect ramblings of fools who will not see the need to forget. And if we can’t dispose of it we can alter it. The dead don’t shout. There is a certain seductiveness about what is dead."
"The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea."
"I couldn’t think and I couldn’t breathe so I started to run."
"Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet."
"I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people’s emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body. This is not fancy."
"But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don’t think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don’t even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it."
"Families, real ones, are chairs and tables and the right number of cups..."
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