Language is an archaeological vehicle… the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. Too-lateness is potentially every moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it’s no longer too late...

How was I to be a scientist, father Lion?’ Science is knowing. What could I have known? Others always did the knowing, knew what was in me, what should come out of me, what was...

Explorers have to be ready to die lost.

We make fiction because we are fiction … It lived us into being and it lives us still.

Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it. Women know where it lives...

All of this comes out of what is now an empty space. There are depths to this. It’s a lot to think about. From an empty space the future. If there’s no empty space where...

There were times when it seemed to him that the different parts of him were not all under the same management.

The silence sat down with them like an invisible creature with its finger to its lips.

When you suffer an attack of nerves you’re being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system?

There were times when it seemed the different parts of him where not all under the same management.

But when I don’t smoke I scarcely feel as if I’m living. I don’t feel as if I’m living unless I’m killing myself.

I said, ‘Yes theres a lot to look a head to. Like croaking iron at Widders Dump. We do the croaking and they get the iron.’He said, ‘Riddley theres other things to do as wel.’I...

There are situations in life to which the only satisfactory response is a physically violent one. If you don’t make that response, you continually relive the unresolved situation over and over in your life.

The things that matter don’t necessarily make sense.

An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of; we blind them as quickly as possible.

Have you paused to consider that there is no way out? Each way out of one situation necessarily being the way into another situation.

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.

I have forgotten more of my life than I remember, and with my forgetting I have lost my being.

Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn’t in us. It’s almost as if we’re put here on earth to show how silly they aren’t.

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Things don’t end; They just accumulate

Language is an archeological vehicle… the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in...