I recalled my father-in-law’s aphorism “To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom…” & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye.

I watched the stars and thought of other lives.

Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going.

The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, itturns ever more perfect. And when it’s perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits theground it gets all mushed up. So it’s only...

Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London’s middle-aged and male, respectably married...

Survival often demands our courage.

London is a language. I guess all places are.

I put my hand on the altar rail. ‘What if … what if Heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you’re dying of thirst, or...

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.

Think larger. Redraw what is possible.

Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman.

¡Y cuando exhales el último suspiro, sólo entonces, te darás cuenta de que tu vida no ha sido más que una minúscula gota en un océano infinito!Y sin embargo, ,qué es un océano sino una...

Coming soon, to a Present near you.

Don’t worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well.

Surgeons are a singular brotherhood, Adam. To us, people aren’t sacred beings crafted in the Almighty’s image, no, people are joints of meat; diseased, leathery meat, yes, but meat ready for the skewer & the...

The sun was deaf’nin’ so high up, yay, it roared an’ time streamed from it.

…there ain’t no journey what don’t change you some.

A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.

The present is a battleground . . . where rival what-ifs compete to become the future ‘what-is.’ How does one what-if prevail over its adversaries? The answer . . . ‘Military and political power, of...

Not a clue – and, no, I don’t touch drugs. The world’s unstable enough without scrambling your brain for kicks.

…that human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too.

The world’s a headmaster who works on your faults. I don’t mean in a mystical or Jesus way. More how you’ll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch...

Fire’s the sun, unwindin’ itself out o’ the wood.

I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so. In moments...

Trees’re always a relief, after people.

Do,” said Louisa finally, “whatever you can’t not do.

Sometimes language can’t even read the music of meaning.

But this isn’t a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she’d be a person.

Lady Moon rose an’ gazed o’er my busted’n’beautsome Valleys with silv’ry’n’sorryin’ eyes, an’ the dingos mourned for the died uns.

Will I be some kid’s dad one day? Are any future people lurking deep inside mine?…Which girl’s carrying the other half of my kid, deep in those intricate loops? What’s she doing right now? What’s...

Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better.

science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity’s powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction.

The library refused many downloads, of course, but I succeeded with two Optimists translated from the Late English, Orwell and Huxley;

Es un ciclo tan antiguo como el tribalismo. Todo comienza con la ignorancia. La ignorancia genera miedo. El miedo genera odio y el odio genera violencia. La violencia provoca más violencia hasta que la única...

Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.

The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it’s the study of historians’ studies. . . .Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of...

Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are.

Reading off a page is like looking down at a landscape from a balloon – your eye “sees” the story as well as reads it, its layout, its paragraphs and structure, and “remembers” what it...

Power and moneyLike Pooh Bear and honeyStick fast.

So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .

Photos’re better than nothing, but things’re better than photos ’cause the things themselves were part of what was there.

This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a...

Politicians and sports coaches both need to be smart enough to master the game, but dumb enough to think it matters.

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides… I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they...

At dawn the waves looked like mountain ranges tipped with gold as sunbeams slanted low under burgundy clouds.

intellectual courage” is to dispense with these fig leaves & admit all peoples are predatory, but White predators, with our deadly duet of disease dust & firearms, are examplars of predacity par excellence, & what...

This is my moral. Trust what you dream. Not what you think.

Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat.” “Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey-believe me.” “But most writers are lunatics, Bat-believe me. The human world is made up of stories, not people.

We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts,...

At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind.