Spill Simmer Falter Wither Quotes

My sadness isn’t a way I feel but a thing trapped inside the walls of my flesh, like a smog. It takes the sheen off everything. It rolls the world in soot. It saps the power from my limbs and presses my back into a stoop.

Life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us, I think. Life likes to tell us it told us so.

I lie down and let life leave its footprints on me.

I was wrong to try and impose something of my humanity on you, when being human never did me any good

What did I use to do all day without you? Already I can't remember.

MAKE WAY FOR A WHOLE NEW YOU. But it took me fifty-seven years to become this me, I think, and I just don’t have the stamina to make so many mistakes all over again.

I’m fifty-seven. Too old for starting over, too young for giving up.

I’m afraid of losing you, I never expected I could be so stupidly afraid of losing you.

I’ve never been anywhere in the world. I wouldn’t know how to get there in the first place.

It’s a sad place, but then I seem to find most places sad, and maybe it’s me who’s sad and not the places after all. Maybe there’s nowhere I can go, and no point in going.

But with summer comes hope, and with hope comes disappointment.

And I wonder if any of the road-kill creatures actually wanted to die and threw themselves beneath the speeding wheels. A lethargic swallow who couldn't bear the prospect of flying all the way back to Africa again. An insomniac hedgehog who couldn't stand the thought of lying awake all winter with no one to talk to.

But it's too late, I'm sorry. Now I have no idea how things begin, nor how to know that they are safe, nor how to show strangers we are safe too.

I was wrong to try and impose something of my humanness upon you, when being human never did me any good.

you can smell everything. You can smell feelings; you can smell time.

Now we see it, lying in the middle of the road. A swan, a mute swan. It looks like an offcut of organza, crumpled around the edges, twitching. As we pass we see its long neck has buckled into its body like a folding chair. We see its wings are tucked back as if the tar is liquid and the swan is swimming. There are two men and a woman in the road. One man is standing on the tar, the other is directing the traffic. The woman is kneeling down beside the swan. I think she is crying, she seems to be crying, and this makes me suddenly angry. I think of all the other creatures we’ve seen since we set out. I think of the rat, the fox, the kitten, the badger. I think of the jackdaw, did you see the jackdaw? We passed it in the queue to pass the swan. Its beak was cracked open, its brains squeeged out. Why didn’t anybody stop for the jackdaw? Because the swan looks like a wedding dress, that’s why. Whereas the jackdaw looks like a bin bag. Because this is how people measure life.

And I feel faintly ordinary, faintly inconspicuous, faintly unsuspicious. And it’s good, so good.

recognise him as a person who is lonely as opposed to solitary, who did not choose to be on his own but involuntarily lost people until he was.

Appreciate the people around you. Don't replump their pillows until they return safely in the evening.

Soon it will be the time of year when it’s vaguely acceptable to be crepuscular, to be wonkety.

Now see the nasturtiums. The leaves are like tiny green parasols blown inside-out and the flowers are terrifically garish. In every village we pass through, see how they are everywhere, how they fill every gap in every wall, every crack in every path. The nasturtiums have it figured out, how survival’s just a matter of filling in the gaps between sun up and sun down. Boiling kettles, peeling potatoes, laundering towels, buying milk, changing light-bulbs, rooting wet mats of pubic hair out of the shower’s plughole. This is the way people survive, by filling one hole at a time for the flightiest of temporary gratifications, over and over and over, until the season’s out and they die off anyway, wither back into the wall or path, into their dark crevasse. This is the way life’s eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself.

Gossamer ribbons swing from your beard and when they hit the kitchen tiles they form a viscous puddle of drool. There’s something resplendent about the way you sit in your viscous drool, and it suits you. Resplendence suits you.

It’s only now you’re gone I see how you’re my reason for doing things. Now I’m a stiltwalker with the stilts removed. My emptied trouser legs flap in the wind and I can’t remember how to walk without being precipitously propped.

I realise that you were not born with a predetermined capacity for wonder, as I’d believed. I realise that you fed it up yourself from tiny pieces of the world. I realise it’s up to me to follow your example and nurture my own wonder, morsel by morsel by morsel.

I expected it would be exciting;  I expected that the freedom from routine was somehow greater than the freedom to determine your own routine. I wanted to get up in the morning and not know exactly what I was going to do that day. But now that I don't, it's terrifying.

How can this blade possibly smell new and different from that blade, and why is it that some require to be pissed upon, and others simply don’t? I wish I’d been born with your capacity for wonder. I wouldn’t mind living a shorter life if my short life could be as vivid as yours.

See the bird walk, the information board, the noble fir in all its hollow frippery. See the takeaway, the chip shop. The pub, the other pub. The grocer’s and the hairdressing salon, all shut. See the community we were insidiously hounded from. See how community is only a good thing when you’re a part of it.

This is the way people survive, by filling one hole at a time for the flightiest of temporary gratifications, over and over and over, until the season’s out and they die off anyway, wither back into the wall or path, into their dark crevasse. This is the way life’s eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself.

We’re still standing outside the front gate of the shell cottage as a boy in football socks stomps down his driveway to retrieve a wheelie bin. Now we watch as he drags it up through the laurel and back to the house. All his gestures are exaggeratedly huffy, though there’s no one to witness his protest, no one but you and me, and the boy didn’t even see us. We walk from the thistles to where the cliff drops into open Atlantic and there’s nothing but luscious, jumping blue all the way to America. I’m still thinking of the boy in the driveway, of how he doesn’t realise how lucky he is to live here where there’s space to run and the salt wind ruddies his cheeks each day, how he takes it all for normal and considers himself entitled to be huffy with the wheelie bin. Now I wonder was I was lucky too, and never grateful? Sometimes a little hungry and sometimes a little cold, but not once sick or struck and every day with the sea to ruddy me. Perhaps I was lucky my father took me back when the neighbour woman rang his doorbell, lucky he never drove away and left me on the road again. But it’s too late to be grateful now. It’s too late now for everything but regret.

I look out the windscreen at all the people walking on the street and sitting on high stools in cafes and queuing beneath the shelter beside the bus stop sign. I know each person is carrying a tiny screen in their pocket. I know each screen holds a list of the names of other people who are not here but somewhere out there also carrying a tiny screen. I know that inside each pocket there’s a goldhaired woman whispering to the person who carries her, telling them they are included.

I’m going to take a chance. I’m going to unclip your leash, unshackle your harness. I’m going to let you chase and rove and zig-zag feverishly, to be your own unhuman and unprogrammable self, free as a fart.

As I leave, you’re sitting on the mat. You’re sitting with your whole body tensed as though in preparation for a blow. You look so mournful and helpless as I leave. You raise your head and watch as the kitchen door closes.

And my name is the same word as for sun beams, as for winged and boneless sharks. But I’m far too solemn and inelegant to be named for either, and besides, my name is just another strange sound sent from the mouths of men to confuse you, to distract from your vocabulary of commands.

He is running, running, running. And it’s like no kind of running he’s ever run before. He’s the surge that burst the dam and he’s pouring down the hillslope, channelling through the grass to the width of his widest part. He’s tripping into hoof-rucks. He’s slapping groundsel stems down dead. Dandelions and chickweed, nettles and dock. This time, there’s no chance for sniff and scavenge and scoff. There are no steel bars to end his lap, no chain to jerk at the limit of its extension, no bellowing to trick and bully him back. This time, he’s further than he’s ever seen before, past every marker along the horizon line, every hump and spork he learned by heart.

Just for a second, I feel like a regular person, doing regular things, in a regular way.

And the tiny figure on the cliffslope’s edge ceases his waiting and springs to his paws and sets off at a sprint. He is running, running, running. He is One Eye. He is on his way.

My thoughts are rancorous, ruinous. They throng through me like a shoal of sharp, silver sprat whenever the outer noises aren’t loud or plenty enough to keep them at bay, to keep them out of the bay, the bay of my brain.

But life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us. Life likes to tell us it told us so.

Now everything holds a diaphanous kind of potential. Now everything is so quiet and so nice and I feel ever so faintly less strange, less horrible. It makes me uneasy. It reminds me how I must remember to be distrustful of good fortune.

It seems almost incredible, how far we can drive in a country so small, without ever really reaching anywhere.

It was hard to hate him then, to treat him cruelly.It would have been like kicking a puppy; it would have made me the troll he'd always led me to believe I was.

I work so hard I forget my ungainliness, I replace it with a reserve of strength I didn’t know until now I’d been reserving, by

He is running, running, running. And it’s like no kind of running he’s ever run before. He’s the surge that burst the dam and he’s pouring down the hillslope, channelling through the grass to the width of his widest part. He’s tripping into hoof-rucks. He’s slapping groundsel stems down dead. Dandelions and chickweed, nettles and dock.

I know you're disconcerted, but I do it because you have to learn to fathom your way through a world of which you are frightened, as I have learned.

I’d again forget that things continue to exist even though I cannot see them.

I didn’t expect that for every shell on the coast there’s a tree in the midlands.

The only consistency is its constancy.

Resplendence suits you.

I have inadvertently trained you, but you have trained me too.

I’ve never looked through his stuff and I can’t explain exactly why it is I’m so incurious. I suppose there are clues about his life there in the shut-up-and-locked room, perhaps even some traces of my mother, but better to be content with ignorance, I’ve always thought, than haunted by the truth.

I’ve never seen what he looks like but his disembodied voice is almost godlike in the way it booms from nowhere and reaches everyone, in the way it’s terribly indistinct but probably trying to tell us something. Now

It’s a village of twitchers and silly-walkers, of old folk and alcoholics and men dressed in high-visibility overalls.

The nasturtiums have it figured out, how survival's just a a manner of filling in the gaps between sun up and sun down, Boiling kettles, peeling potatoes, laundering towels, buying milk, changing lightbulbs, rooting wet mats of pubic hair out of the shower's plughole. This is the way people survive, by filling one hole at a time for flightiest of temporary gratifications, over and over and over, until the season's out and they die off anyway, wither back into the wall or path, into their dark crevasse. This is the way life's eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself.

but I do it because you have to learn to fathom your way through a world of which you are frightened, as I have learned.

Sometimes I see the sadness in you, the same sadness that's in me. It's in the way you sigh and stare and hang your head. It's in the way you never wholly let your guard down and take the world I've given you for granted. My sadness isn't a way I feel but a thing trapped inside the walls of my flesh, like a smog. It takes the sheen off everything. It rolls the world in soot. It saps the power from my limbs and presses my back into a stoop.

E quando c'è l'alta marea vediamo coppie di anatre, sono sempre in coppia. Le anatre sono come i calzini. Se ce n'è soltanto una, qualcosa non va.

Si accumulano anche tutti i libri che ho letto. Righe e paragrafi si confondono. A volte ricordo alcuni personaggi e penso, solo per un secondo, che sono persone che ho conosciuto in passato. A volte ricordo alcuni posti e penso, solo per un secondo, di esserci stato.

I’m not the kind of person who is able to do things, have I told you this already? I lie down and let life leave its footprints on me.

Past countless closed doors behind which are countless uncaring strangers, their lives going on and on and on, relentlessly.

You can guess the size of a village by the grandiosity of its grotto. Blonde Marys, black Marys. Marys in blue, Marys in white, but Mary always draped in rosary beads, standing on a serpent and holding her palms open around the height of her crotch.

The outer noises are important to me. It doesn’t matter what form they take or how loud they are, but I need to keep them always sounding. I depend on them to gag my thoughts. My thoughts are rancorous, ruinous. They throng through me like a shoal of sharp, silver sprat whenever the outer noises aren’t loud or plenty enough to keep them at bay, to keep them out of the bay, the bay of my brain. I need them most of all during the hours of sleeplessness, the only time at which I can’t play the radio because it would run the car’s battery flat.

From the apron hooks to the chimney pots, the house is every bit as dark and somnolent as it ought to be. It’s almost noon.