Books’ll be back,” Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. “Wait till the power grids start failing in the 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.
Books tended not to switch their stories whenever it suited them.
...books may speak, but they do not listen.
Not a clue – and, no, I don’t touch drugs. The world’s unstable enough without scrambling your brain for kicks.
I think about pinball, and how being a kid’s like being shot up the firing lane and there’s no veering left or right; you’re just sort of propelled. But once you clear the top, like when you’re sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, suddenly there�...
Rootlessness," I opine, "is the twenty-first century norm." "You're not wrong and that's why we're in the shit we're in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker's toss about anywhere?
Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark.
You only value something if you know it’ll end.
Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences.
Men marry women hoping they'll never change. Women marry men hoping they will.
A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant
Nonfiction that smells like fiction is neither.
If poor doomed Olly’s a Radio 4 play, what am I?”” “You, Hugo,” she kisses my earlobe, “are a sordid, low-budget French film. The sort you’d stumble across on TV at night. You know you’ll regret it in the morning, but you keep watchin...
The Future,” says Ian, in a film-trailer voice. “Coming soon, to a Present near you.
Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.
I'd love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I'd love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it.
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 when someone's nice to you for no reason, or ...' Mam's pancakes with Toblerone sauce; Dad d...
Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless.
