Quote Bank

“The prospect of driving down and seeing something of the Big Smoke excited him, but he felt he should disguise the fact.”

“In some secret place where the life in him was most immediately physical, he still clung to a vision of himself that for a time back there had seemed golden and inextinguishable.”

“He thought he had dealt with it, outgrown it, let it go, and without too much disappointment replaced its bouts of extravagant yearning with the reality of small prospects, work, the life he and Helen had made together. And now this.”

“In Debbie, he had, for an hour or so, felt the breath of something he had missed out on. Something extra, something more.”

“This was it. Elsewhere. He was in the middle of it.”

“the exhilaration, the allure, of a faster and more crowded world 'down there'”

“Andy, stirred by a rush of tenderness, but also of tender sensuality, brought his fingertips to a strand of hair, damp with steam, that had stuck to the soft white of her neck.”

“It was the bulk of his own body he felt crammed into a coffin. How close the lid would be over his head. And how dark it must be in there when the chapel all around was so full of sunlight.”

“He wondered what shoes she was wearing in there.”

“He pushed a finger into his collar and eased it a bit, but felt the blood swelling in the veins of his neck.”

“Not from his body—he was more aware than ever of that, of its blockiness and persistence—but from the earth's pull upon it.”

“Harry was silent, but that wasn't unusual. They were often silent together.”

“It's his daughter, he thought. He's the father. Someone ought to have mentioned that.”

“'She was such a bright little thing,' he said. 'You wouldn't credit.'”

“A single bald statement breaking surface out of the stream of thought Harry was adrift in—which was all, Andy thought, he might ever hear.”

“He had his own bright little girl, Janine. She was ten. He felt sweetly bound to her—painfully bound, he felt now, in the prospect of inevitable loss. She too would go off, go elsewhere.”

“A wave of sadness struck him. Not only for Harry's isolation but for his own…they might as well have been on different planets.”

“'What's a muse? Do you know what it means? A muse?'”

“What his quickened senses caught out there was the outstretched figure of a long-bodied woman under a sheet, thin as a veil, slowly turning in her sleep.”

“He did not refer to the fact that she was actually here, screwed down now inside the coffin they'd carried in.”

“Since he had arrived in this house he was the only one, so far as he knew, who'd volunteered her name.”

“'Who's Debbie?' she asked, genuinely stumped.”

“the woman pushed her knee between his thighs in the thick woollen suit and her tongue into his mouth”

“'au naturel, I like it. Where have they been keeping you?'”

“Somewhere in the back of his head, as the woman urged her tongue into it and her hand went exploring below, he was repeating to himself 'I'm Debbie's brother-in-law. She's dead, this is her wake.'”

“He liked it that for once someone else was making the moves.”

“shirts pegged awkwardly at the shoulder so that the sleeves hung empty and slack”

“the shirts white in the growing darkness, filling with air a moment, then collapsing; the tree, also stirring, filling with air and all its crowded gathering of leaves responding, shivering”

“He thought of Helen. Of the girls. He did not want the feeling of sadness that came to him, which had been there all day, he felt, under the throb of expectation.”

“Something had come to him back there and changed things. When? he wondered.”

“His body, which knew better than his slow mind, set him back in the bluish dusk of that back porch.”

“Or it was a way of looking at things that was in himself. That was himself.”

“To Debbie, he read on a page all to itself. All through, he could see, her name was scattered. Debbie. Sometimes Deb.”

“'Cunt.' Right there on the page. So unexpected it made his stomach jump. In a book of poetry!”

“It was about things that were private, that's what he saw. But here they were in a book that just anyone could pick up.”

“Harry…forced the book into another [pocket], and turned down the hallway towards the front door.”

“They pushed through, conspicuous, Andy thought, in their suits. People looked and raised an eyebrow. Maybe they think we're cops, Andy thought. It made him smile.”

“'Never bloody met anyone,' Harry told him.”

“'Debbie's brother-in-law,' he told her, but without making it sound, he hoped, like a claim.”

“she did not want him to see in her the sort of woman who might recognise or allow it”

“everything he'd heard of Debbie's doings had come from Helen and he wondered how much more she knew than she let on”

“Boardriders miraculously rose up and for long moments kept their balance on running sunlight, then went down in a flurry of foam.”

“those lights off to the side of the ribboning highway—small townships settled down to the night's TV, roadside service stations all lit up in the dark, with their aisles of chocolate biscuits and potato crisps—were far-flung constellations”

“Harry, afloat now in the vast realm of sleep, and he, in a lapse of consciousness of a different kind, had taken off, and weightless as in space or in flying dreams, were flying.”

“it was not marked on the wall-map in our third-grade schoolroom, and I could not find it in any atlas; which gave it the status of a secret place”

“It was there, but only in our heads. It had a history, but only in the telling”

“Fellows who went out there were changed—that's what I saw”

“Kids who had been swaggering and loud were quiet when they spoke of it, as if they knew more now than they were ready to let on, or had words for, or were permitted to tell”

“An occasion that was sacred in its way, though no one, least of all the kid who was now retelling it, would ever speak of it that way”

“All that side of things you had to catch at a glance as you looked away. From the slight, almost imperceptible warping upwards of a deliberately flattened voice.”

“like a page of Genesis, with spur-winged plover, masked plover, eastern swamphen, marshy moorhen…”

“He had been a soldier in New Guinea and had seen enough perhaps, for one lifetime, of killing”

“men who were used to consulting him in a friendly way about a dispute with a neighbour…developed a sudden interest in their boots when they ran into him away from his desk”

“in defiance of local custom sent all three of us to school in shoes. This was understandable in the case of my sisters…It was regarded as unnecessary and even, perhaps, damaging in a boy.”

“I wanted to be one of them, or at least to be like them. Like Glen. Like Stuart even. I wasn't of course, but then neither was Braden.”

“'Good,' he said, not sounding regretful. 'I want you to look out and be careful, that's all…But your mother will worry her soul case out till you're home again.' What he meant was, he would.”

“the revelation—even to ourselves, though we were too young as yet to know it—of bright, conjectural futures we would have admitted to no one else”

“I had for so long been paired with Braden, we had shared so many discoveries and first thoughts, that I had assumed we were in every way alike”

“I did not want to know what I had already begun in some part of me to suspect. That Braden's oddness might be quite different from anything I could lay claim to.”

“a music, behind the rambling stories he told, that I had all along been deaf to”

“this was the opening of a gap between us. Not of affection—no question of that—but of where our lives might take us”

“For the first time in my life I felt lonely. But not so lonely, I think, so finally set apart as he felt.”

“'You two are weird,' Braden's brother Stuart told us with a disgusted look…'God, you're weird. You're weird!'”

“Matt…was singing to him—that's how I heard it. Slowing him down. Creating in him a steady state of being inside himself.”

“In the index finger that would gently squeeze the trigger. In the softness of his shoulder that would take the impact of the shot down through his spine, his buttocks, the muscles at the back of his calves to the balls of his feet where they were spread just wide enough to balance the six feet two of him squarely on the earth.”

“Twenty minutes from now, Braden would have it for ever. Even if he never returned to any of this, it would be his.”

“It was this, rather than the business of simply putting a shot into the brain of a maddened beast, that he had come out here to get hold of so that these witnesses to it—his father, his brothers, the professional, Matt Riley, Henry Denkler—would know he had it, that they had passed it on.”

“He had wanted it to go well for his father's sake as much as his own; out of a wish, just this once and for this time only, to be all that his father wanted him to be.”

“When he left at the beginning of the new year it would be for a life he would never come back from; even if he did, physically, come back.”

“Glen saw nothing at all. It was inconceivable to him that a fellow of Braden's sort…could imagine anything finer or more real than what had just been revealed to him: the deep connection between himself and these men he was with; his even deeper connection with that force out there, animal, ancient, darkly close and mysterious”

“He was literary in the odd way of a fellow who did not read and who trusted my capacity to appreciate what he was feeling because I did”

“Stuart's self-pitying tone…had more to do with the way he wanted me to see him, or the way he wanted to see himself, than with anything he really was”

“The nakedness with which he paraded his feelings dismayed me. It removed all the grounds, I thought, on which I could react and offer him real sympathy. It violated the only code, as I saw it then, that offered us protection: tight-lipped understatement, endurance.”

“'What else could we rely on? What else could I rely on?'”

“a single ravaged limb thrust out in the dirt…has a brute particularity that brought me closer to something exposed and shockingly intimate in him, to the bare forked animal”

“It was Stuart McGowan's blood I was staring at. What impressed me, in the brute light of day, was its wetness, how much there was of it, the alarming blatancy of its red.”

“He was pleased with himself! At being the undoubted centre of so much drama and concern.”

“He had done this for her!”

“Maybe what I thought I knew about people—about Stuart, about myself—was unreliable”

“What a bundle of contradictions he is, I told myself”

“I was less ready now with my glib assumptions. What did I know of Stuart McGowan's 'character' as I called it? Of what might or might not belong to it?”

“No one would ever have spoken of Matt Riley's 'grandfather.' That would have given something away that in those days was still buried where family history meant it to stay, in the realm of the unspoken.”

“'His grandmother's country' was a phrase that referred, without raising too precisely the question of blood, to the relationship a man might stand in to a particular tract of land, that went deeper and further back than legal possession”

“When used in town it had 'implications,' easy to pick up but not to be articulated. A nod to the knowing.”

“Doing whatever had to be done to make it theirs in spirit as well as in fact. Brooking no question, and suffering, one guesses, no regrets, since such work was an arm of progress and of God's good muscular plan for the world.”

“The land out here was Matt's grandmother's country, and the moment he entered it he had a different status: that was the accepted but unspoken ground of his authority”

“He had re-entered a part of himself that was continuous with the place, and with a history the rest of us had forgotten or never known.”

“a place he both knew and was a stranger to; so deep in him that only rarely perhaps, save in sleep or half-sleep, did he catch a whisper of it”

“a language he understood in his bones and through the soles of his feet, though he had no other tongue in his head, or his memory, than the one we all spoke”

“The place was for him all coded messages; hints, clues, shining particulars that once scanned, and inwardly brooded on, opened the way to another order of understanding and usefulness.”

“a consciousness—not simply my own—that belonged not only to the body I was in…but also to something out there that I had melted into as one melts into sleep, and was infinite”

“I began to forget my own disruptive presence, receding as naturally into what hummed and shimmered all round me as into a dimension of my own being that it had taken my coming out here, alone, in the slumbrous hour after midday, to uncover”

“I was central to it but I was also nothing, or close to nothing”

“It was time, not space, I was moving into”

“There was no specific point I was heading for…It was myself I was moving into.”

“Nothing like that had come to me. I was no more settled, no less confused. I would bring nothing back that would be visible to others”

“I had lost something; that was more like it. But happily.”

“'There are no sides. There never will be for you. That's what I love about you.'”

“'I've got to get out…Nothing will ever happen if I stay here. I'd end up marrying Stuart, or someone just like him, and it'd kill me.'”

“'Oh, boys. Men. You're all so—tight with one another.'”

“The difference was, I thought, that he, like Katie, would not come back. But for me there could be no final leaving.”

“This greenish light, full and luminous, always with a heaviness in it that was a reminder of the underlying dark…was for me the light by which all moments of expectation and high feeling would in my mind for ever be touched.”

“This was the country I would go on dreaming in, wherever I lay my head.”

“'Goodnight, Irene,' was what he was singing, 'I'll see you in my dreams.'”

“Talk out here, at this hour, was not so much an exchange of the usual observations and asides as a momentary reassurance, subdued, unassertive, of presence, of company and speech”

“How straightforward animals are, I thought. As compared to people, with their left-handed unhappy agendas, their sore places hidden even from themselves.”

“what Charlie saw in the long wardrobe mirror in his room (he'd been reading War and Peace) was a French cavalry officer in the Napoleonic Wars in flight from Cossacks”

“Beyond that you could present yourself as you wanted to be seen and then try to live up to it”

“They would remember his going. They would remember that he had come to say goodbye.”

“he really looked the part”

“he had organised a small carnival for himself”

“some reflection of himself that till now had subtly eluded him”

“he was not reconsidering—he had never in fact considered”

“since the ballot was announced his life had had a shape. He could see himself.”

“'Who did you say he was?' … 'Have I met him? Was he at the wedding?'”

“Listening, really listening, was a kind of looking”

“a navy blue air force greatcoat of his father's, who had been a Spitfire pilot in the war”

“the skirts of the greatcoat open like dark wings”

“The greatcoat was draped over the back of a chair”

“She touched the sleeve of the greatcoat”

“He hung the greatcoat in the wardrobe—the period of that particular uniform was over”

“The odour of mothballs had faded over the weeks. There was another smell now, not quite familiar. Was that him?”

“His father's greatcoat. Which he had commandeered for a bit. And where was his father?”

“this Charlie, whose shadow fell so darkly over the house, was his father”

“it was not really him that his grandfather was speaking to but that other, who once, before he failed them all, had also been young, and had not yet discovered, or not yet revealed, that failure was what he was inevitably heading for”

“His father seemed frighteningly present then in his own name and skin”

“No hint of failure there, or of failings either”

“the high spirits that had swept him up, and the high action he had been involved in, were an aspect of his own nature rather than of the times; were in him rather than in the air”

“Being theatrical was something, later, when his mother was gone, that he would be severely warned against; as he was against being, like his father, weak—it was the double inheritance he must constantly fight against”

“His father had always been absent in one way. Now he was absent in another.”

“His father too had come home without wounds”

“a pang of doubt about his own too easy optimism”

“no one had told him how it would be at his father's funeral and how he should stand”

“the noise of their shrieking so fierce, so like the sound of souls in torment, that all the people turned their heads”

“some things, most things as it turned out, were better left unsaid”

“the house was full of watchers. Not just his grandfather and aunt, but those presences, invisible but by no means to be underestimated”

“As palpably there as the furniture—big old-fashioned dining chairs with high backs, ample seats, solid legs”

“Perhaps it was the furniture, and the shadow it cast, that had alarmed his mother and driven her from the house”

“Was he unlovable? Did he remind her too much of his father? Was she simply—he felt the implication of this in his aunt's silence on the matter—weak?”

“the old man might be willing to accept even a lack of strength in this last of his line if he could be kept home and safe from harm”

“he really was angry, though not with the neighbour. And not with me either, Charlie said to himself, but with the fact that I am going. Maybe even with the war.”

“And that, on a quiet Sunday morning in August 1968, was how Charlie Dowd went to a war.”

“Again her fingertips. Soft on his cheek.”

“Look after yourself, boy”

“They were becalmed at the end of their lives, that's what he saw, and he was becalmed in the middle of his, but nearer the beginning”

“the whole world seemed to be waiting only for the coming on of dark”

“the certainty he had needed to give his life direction; to close off an open and indeterminate future where he might have gone on stumbling about in a maze that had no end”

“He'd let a roll of the barrel decide things. Given himself over to hazard, to chance. In a spirit, as he thought, of existential stoicism.”

“fellows who brought back, in one way or another, a good deal less of themselves than they had taken away”

“He felt he existed in a space which, the moment he stepped out of it, would close behind him”

“a ghostly quality of your own absence even when you were most warmly there”

“He had never tasted Tokay, or champagne or oysters, or slept with a girl or been further from home…But he was young, and believed, even with Vietnam up ahead, that he had time.”

“How much else was there, he wondered, that he wouldn't have time now to discover?”

“in spirit he was already gone”

“'You've got no imagination,' Josie accused.”

“His going or not going concerned only himself…With how he saw himself and wanted others to see him”

“It involved words it would have embarrassed him to use. Things that could be thought, and warmly felt, but not stated.”

“her eyes were bright with something different”

“She kissed him lightly to one side of his mouth and turned back into the house.”

“his life, his life, the one he felt so strongly pulsing through him, was of no account”

“silences, none of them heavy as elsewhere with the unsaid, was tonic”

“To mark him; mark him off”

“a phantom limb that continued to putrify”

“fragments of shrapnel in his flesh that sent metal detectors into electronic fits”

“bearing on his breath spores from the soil of a disorderly and darkly divided country”

“Ghosts he carried in him who saw things in their own way”

“one of these ghostly selves who now sheltered in him might speak up and send a conversation skidding in some new and terrible direction”

“as if with no warning a mask had slipped”

“The wall of silence he felt between himself and others, which he refused to breach, was noise of a kind they could not even begin to conceive”

“the scream of metal and the lower but distinguishable screams of men”

“the collision, when it came, so wet and personal”

“Found he was sweating”

“a taste in his mouth that no other could quite displace”

“the gap between their glib abstractions and what he himself had come across in the way of fact”

“the heaviness of a soaked pack and mud-caked army boots; grime, dank sweat, the death smell of bloated corpses”

“He ate. Chewing slowly. Swallowing it down.”

“So he watched himself. Watched them.”

“Detached. Floating.”

“the pressures now were soft, the dangers more insidious because not deadly. Or not immediately so.”

“almost unscathed and nearly two stone heavier”

“had changed too much for them to see in him the thin-shouldered youth in the air force greatcoat”

“But when he looked across, the boy was still there”

“Impossible now to get back into that boy's head”

“a slighter sharer of his own more solid flesh”

“Perhaps it was better that the notebook was lost”

“A skylight filled the whole space with the kind of light that would once have been considered dangerous”

“There were no curtains now, and little fear of grime”

“Hard, he thought, for the old presences to find harbour in a world that was so shadowless and bright”

“Had it always been there, waiting to establish itself the moment the old man was gone? A refutation, long unspoken, of his world of solid truths?”

“She had a sharp eye…a sharp tongue too, now that her father was not here to monitor it”

“neither of them any longer believed in rules. That's what he saw. The new rule was to pretend they did”

“only now did he understand how much of her life had been devoted to fulfilling what his mother, by leaving, had passed to her in the way of duty, and of affection too”

“It wasn't a question of innocence, or the loss of innocence”

“the least motion on our part, even the drawing of a breath, may so change things that another, close by or far off, will be nudged just far enough out of the clear line of his life as to be permanently impaired”

“no man is innocent. As for the loss of innocence, how could you lose what you'd never had?”

“He had never claimed to be innocent. Only alive.”

“hundreds of seagulls had flocked in, bringing with them the light of ocean beaches and of the ocean itself”

“to translate what had been one kind of landscape into something entirely other”

“not just of another world, but of a world inside the one at their feet that they had scarcely dreamed of”

“nothing was final, or beyond surprise or change”

“the force he felt in touch with was in himself”

“'Magic,' Charlie told the boy with a laugh”

“Charlie actually felt a breath of what the child's belief had accorded him”

“the end of one thing and the beginning of another”

“this concatenation of small events to touch it awake and open a way to the future”

“the agents of it could be small”

“He did not know as yet that there was a change. Only that it was possible, and that the agents of it could be small. But that, for the moment, was enough.”