We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horr...
Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the girl with her sachet & dancing slippers had slipped away & there was left a woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies & turned her hands to many menial tasks, a woman to whom...
The sunrise was the colour of bad blood. It leaked out of the east and stained the dark sky red, marked the scraps of the cloud with stolen gold. Underneath it the road twisted up the mountainside towards the fortress of Fontezarmo - a cluster of sha...
Kimme and Dan joined us as they returned from their stroll along the beach. “Look what I found,” Kimme announced as she dumped a pile of seashells out on the sand. I smiled at Kimme as she sifted through her treasure. Then I thought about the tre...
Yet, despite all, it is a difficult thing to admit the existence of ghosts in a coldly factual world. One's very instincts rebel at the admission of such maddening possibility. For, once the initial step is made into the supernatural, there is no tur...
I could not have asked for a better friends or a better life, but there’s a nasty trick about living. It happens at its own pace and in its own way and you never, never know what’s coming next. So you keep running and running to keep up with it a...
The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not...
The measure of a man comes down to moments, spread out like dots of pain on the canvas on life. Everything you were, everything you'll someday be, resides in the small, seemingly ordinary choices of everyday life.....Each decision seems as insignific...
A radical love story is the only device that makes the time-chariot of a village, a city, a country, gallop faster. Such a love story pulls the wheels of that chariot from a murky, regressive past towards a spotlessly clean road under autumn-blue ski...
Water is central to Jacksonville, and natives think of rivers as roads. Why, just the other day I was driving on the interstate, and I was being tailgated by a lunatic in a canoe. So I slammed on my breaks, hopped out of my boat, and threatened to sp...
When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the cloud...
The word goodbye stuck to her tongue. She wasn’t ready to say it. Because goodbye weighed more when forever hung off the end. And she wasn’t sure about forever. She wasn’t sure about anything. Except that, at that moment, she wanted to believe ...
Dynamic/Active vs. Static/Passive. The Biblical statement, '...and with knowledge gain understanding, and with understanding gain wisdom'- NT (passim), speaks to an active experiential involvement necessary on our part in producing a state of dynamic...
It seems like with you everything leads back to the subject of death." "Sure and show me the person's road that does not lead to death. we try to divert our attention, to pretend 'tisn't so, but the very air we breathe is vulture's breath. Please don...
Then he holds her and for a moment I hear total silence; that totally silent part of a cry that announces that the most horrible grief is going to follow. And it does, and he's muffling it, but I can hear and I want someone to come over and jab her w...
This is what I know. I look like my father. My father disappeared when he was seventeen years old. Hannah once told me that there is something unnatural about being older than your father ever got to be. When you can say that at the age of seventeen,...
Not just a name but a state of mind I never want to revisit, although I do keep him at the back of my mind for those times I get my hopes raised about something. So then I can slap myself into reality and remind myself of what happens when you let so...
When I turn around, he cups my face in his hands and he kisses me so deeply that I don't know who is breathing for who, but his mouth and tongue taste like warm honey. I don't know how long it lasts, but when I let go of him, I miss it already.
When it was over, she gathered him in her arms. And told him the terrible irony of her life. That she had wanted to be dead all those years while her brother had been alive. That had been her sin. And this was her penance. Wanting to live when everyo...
Hannah, do you think that your mum and dad and Tate's mum and dad and my mum and dad and Webb and Tate are all together someplace?' she asks earnestly. I look at Hannah, waiting for the answer. And then she smiles. Webb once said that a Narnie smile ...
What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying...
