"He remembered, or thought he remembered, walking alongside him on a shingle beach, but it was the difficulty of walking on shingle while holding an adult’s hand that informed the memory, not any paternal warmth."
"Perhaps it wasn’t beauty, ultimately, that won men to women or vice versa, but an ability to make one laugh?"
"Pomposity. Severity. Snobbery. They were all masks for various sorts of fear."
"Frank could decline any number of Greek verbs and rattle off a sequence of prime numbers, but he could never anticipate the illogical choices of ordinary humans so was forever being made to feel odd by comparison, a situation little aided by his inability to dissemble when politeness required it, or to talk of unimportant matters simply to put others at their ease."
"I cheer myself with the conviction that most men are pretending to a maturity they do not feel. They swagger and pose and grow beards to hide behind, but they spend most of their lives secretly afraid and ill-equipped, as scared of women as they are of one another.’"
"‘I am. Of course I am. I trained up in its systems, but one of the many points on which I disagree with psychiatric medicine is its confidence that it knows what it is doing.’ ‘Doesn’t it?’ ‘No.’ Gideon sat on a bench and Harry sat beside him. ‘Places like Essondale exist because we don’t know what else to do with people who threaten themselves or who frighten us by hearing voices or talking to people who aren’t there. We have sought to catalogue all the ills of the mind, giving them tidy Latin names and subdivisions –dementia praecox and hebephrenic schizophrenia –like so many strange flowers in a sinister corner of a garden, but really they’re of no more use than the fanciful names of the constellations. As for treatments, we pretend we know what we’re doing, using darkness or continuous baths or cold wraps or sedatives, but strictly speaking, it is all experimental and every unfortunate inmate of a place like Essondale is a sad hybrid of untried prisoner and guinea pig.’ He sighed, turned, smiled, and patted Harry’s knee. ‘Sorry, Harry. You got me preaching.’"
"‘When a woman out here dares to accuse a man of . . . assaulting her person, she is nearly always disgraced by the process. While the man walks free to attack again.’ ‘But why?’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Oh, so many reasons. Not the least of which is that the law is a blind woman and the judge usually an unloved old man. The lack of proof or witnesses. The embarrassment of the judge and jury. Her failure to scream loud enough to show she took no pleasure in the proceedings.’"
"‘Trust me. I understand. Gideon has been leading you along a line –so very like a man; so methodical and tidy –but life isn’t made of lines. He is like a traveller who looks left and right but doesn’t think to look behind or above him. Men like that get eaten by cougars.’"
"It was bitter, like biting directly into memory itself. It also rapidly had the odd effect of numbing his mouth, so that he became worried about accidentally biting his tongue. He certainly couldn’t have spoken clearly, even if he swallowed first."
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