Even after she was gone, he passed her place each day: something white in a high window - not a face, but the white belly of a pigeon beating its wings against the pane in the boarded-up house.
May Allah bless you." Or had she said: "May Allah burn you?" He was not sure which: the two Arabic words sounded so much alike.
Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.
Once in a while, I smell Clive on my skin and it stops my day. It's a train crossing; I wait to pass. Eventually the lights stop flashing, the barriers lift. I keep moving.
That was one of the troubles with the Istiqlal, with all politics: you talked about people as though they were not really people, as though they were only things, numbers, animals, perhaps, but not really people.
Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded.
Everything people forget about ends up there one day, they said. Toys, tables, whole houses. And people end up there too. They get forgotten as well.
Easy, man." He slowly turned and his dark eyes narrowed. "Don't mess up your house. Or my face. You like us both. We'll deal with how to handle this as soon as you calm down.
It's been six months since she died. But Ove still inspects the whole house twice a day to feel the radiators and check that she hasn't sneakily turned up the heating.
Sometimes you can lock the doors and close the blinds, but the monsters are still there inside your house, sleeping and breathing and just waiting to wake up and terrorize you all over again.
A brand is built action by action, just as houses are built brick by brick. Is the identity of your personal brand homeless?
I had the impression that her place was near mine, but even by bus it took about twenty minutes. She lived alone in an apartment house, square and white like a block of tofu, on the edge of town.
I'm usually a bit awkward in houses that I haven't been to before, so it's a way to not look weird. If I find something I've read before it automatically makes me more comfortable.
A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the panis angelorum.
The word house didn't begin to do justice for the white and gray structure in front of me. I actually had to tilt my head back to see all the way up to the roof.
There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.
Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.
He could sit in the dust and dark of the carriage house and rot for the rest of his life. Clearly that's what he wished to do. It was not my place to get in the way of so profound a destiny.
I remembered standing in the middle of the street in front of The Crooked Bookshelf, filled with the certainty of a future. I had heard the wolves howling behind the house and remembered how glad I had been to be human.
Mmmm,' hummed Mum. 'What's it called?' 'Butch,' Dad told her. 'Butch!' Mum repeated. 'It doesn't sound like a small, docile, house-trained dog to me
If I was a cynic I would be wondering if sooner or later some charismatic douche-bag might stomp all over this Little House on the Prairie dream of yours.
