Tangled Mind

I only wanted books -- nothing more -- only books, only words, it was never anything but words -- give them to me, I don’t have any! ... What do you mean there’s nothing? Then how can you talk and cry, what words are you frightened with, which ones do you call out in your sleep? Don’t nighttime cries roam inside you, a thudding twilight murmur, a fresh morning shriek? There they are, words -- don’t you recognise them? They’re writhing inside you, trying to get out! From wood, stone, roots, growing in strength, a dull mooing and whining in the gut is trying to get out; a piece of tongue curls, the torn nostrils swell in torment. That’s how the bewitched, beaten, and twisted snuffle with a mangy wail, their boiled white eyes locked up in closets, their vein torn out, backbone clawed; that’s how your pushkin writhed ...(p. 268)

I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it. (p. 112)

Meanwhile, Jennifer Brown has been arrested for taking drugs at a rock and roll club and is in the Tower waiting for the police to do her over. Ronald Brown, the son, has been beaten again, I'm not sure what for, but the class suspect an older boy has been corrupting him into the English vice, as they call it. Mrs Brown is still concerned about conditions at the local factory ... It's such a farrago of nonsense, what they make up, but having invented it, they're quite ready to believe it's how life in England actually is. (p. 75)

Holmes was dead: to begin with. And had been dead for well onto two years. And who was I without Holmes? He had been my dearest friend. He had served as that fixed point around which my life as a storyteller revolved. (p. 3)

When Stella contemplated her own progress through time and space, she saw lines -- black lines that zig-zagged this way and that, netting the map of England, netting the globe ... and sometimes these lines crossed one another. The intersections must surely be points of significance -- these places to which she had been twice, three times, many times, but as different incarnations of herself, different Stellas ignorant of the significance of this site ... Stella thought of those spiderwebs that form an airy complex density of minutely connected strands. Her space-time progress was something like that, the whole thing shimmering with these portentous nodes at which the future lay hidden. You walk blindly past the self that is to come, and cannot see her. (p. 19)

I volunteered at the right time, just when Havemercy was fresh off the table, and she was being real picky and real precise about not having anyone fly her no matter how they coaxed, until she took one look at me and it was love at first sight, only we both knew the other one didn't have any heart for loving to speak of. She was beautiful then and she's still beautiful now, though there's a clip off her left wing from getting in too close to the real fighting one time, but we turned the tide of the skirmish and sent the Ke-Han packing ... so I guess we did all right by that. (p. 73)

Ryan pulled out one of the sweetcorn cans and hefted it to shoulder height, but the muscles in his arms seemed to have gone slack. What was he hoping to do, scare them away like stray dogs? The trolleys juddered their plastic child seats with a wet paddling sound and jangled their chains. Ryan was reminded of a snake's rattle. Feeling sick, he decided to come quietly.
Ryan's mother and father noticed nothing as their only son was taken into custody by a host of supermarket trolleys and herded to the far side of the car park. (p. 158)

... there he was again -- right smack back in the same place, slogging through black river water to his knees under the jaundice-yellow sky. Skulls to the left of him, flowers to the right, the very air itself an obsidian storm through which knives swirled by, drawing blood 'til it felt like all he had left for skin was a single walking wound.(p.14)

Pebble-hard fenugreek lies tight and closed in the centre of your palm, colour of sand at the bottom of an old creek. But put it in water and it will bloom free.
Bite the swollen kernels between your teeth and taste its bitter sweetness. Taste of waterweeds in a wild place, the cry of grey geese. Fenugreek Tuesday's spice, when the air is green like mosses after rain. Spice for days when I want to huddle into a quilt stitched with peepul leaves and tell stories like on the island. Except here who would I tell them to. (p. 47)

It would never be exactly as Reinhardt dreamt. nothing could. How lucky mortals are, thought Lewis, that they never live long enough to learn it. (p.23)