Pronek in History
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Empire
Richard Ford
‘Outside on the cold air, flames moved and divided and swarmed the sky. And Sims felt alone in a wide empire, removed and afloat, calmed, as if life was far away now, as if blackness was all around.’
Fast Lanes
Jayne Anne Phillips
‘I was vanished, invisible, another apartment left empty behind me, my possessions given away, thrown away, packed away in taped boxes fit into an available vehicle.’
Fishing with Wussy
Richard Russo
‘Until I was six I thought of my father the way I thought of ‘my heavenly father’, whose existence was a matter of record, but who was, practically speaking, absent and therefore irrelevant.’
Memphis
Ellen Gilchrist
‘He drove off in her car. He was wearing a white visor, a white shirt with long sleeves. I don't believe the world I lived to see.’
The Contas Girl
Robert Olmstead
‘He always felt foolish after he finished making love to the Contas girl. He felt a little piece had been given up of its own will.’
Escapes
Joy Williams
‘We went directly out of the theatre and into the streets, my mother weeping on the little usher's arm.’
Fiction by Joy Williams.
Knives
Louise Erdrich
‘It is time, now, for Karl to break down with his confession that I am a slow-burning fuse in his loins. A hair trigger. I am a name he cannot silence. A dream that never burst.’
Fiction by Louise Erdrich.
Getting The Words Out
John Updike
‘No, it is not confrontation but some wish to avoid it, some hasty wish to please, that betrays my flow of speech.’
Los Angeles Without A Map
Richard Rayner
‘I was a hysterical adolescent. But I was a hysterical adolescent with a credit card and there was a seat available.’
Slim
Adam Mars-Jones
‘My African family doesn't have the money for photographs. My African family may never even have seen a photograph.’
A True Afrikaner
Mary Benson
‘What first struck me was his courtesy: it never faltered even when some remark by the prosecutor or an action by the police angered him, hardening the expression in his blue eyes.’
Eye For An Eye: A Chronicle of Northern Ireland (Part One)
Nan Richardson & Gilles Peress
‘Belfast. There was a sound of glass breaking all over the city and a roar. Nine bomb blasts went off simultaneously in Belfast and five other cities: Newry on the border; Armargh; Londonderry; Portadown, the industrial city; and Lisburn, the Protestant northern enclave.’
From Lab To Writing Desk
Primo Levi
‘I had not aimed for literary celebrity, and I felt at ease with myself for having done my civic duty as a witness, and felt relieved of the burden of slavery.’
Thoughts of a Storyteller on a Happy Ending
Gianni Celati
‘By inserting pages or just strips of paper at the points which needed changing he transformed their conclusion, to bring them always to a happy ending.’
While Waiting for a War
Graham Greene
‘The man who believes in eternity must often experience an acute nostalgia for atheism - to indulge himself with the rest.’
‘They’: Stalin’s Polish Élite
Teresa Toranska
‘You referred to a comrade as ‘Mister’. That's offensive.’
In Search of Amin
Patrick Marnham
‘In Chicago and London the men who had never been to Amin’s Uganda already knew what they thought. An eye-witness account only served to confuse them.’
Prague: A Disappearing Poem
Milan Kundera
‘Prague, this dramatic and suffering centre of Western destiny, is gradually fading away into the mists of Eastern Europe, to which it has never really belonged.’
Forced Busing in South Africa
Joseph Lelyveld
‘In the other scene of black men in the dock, there had been fifty-six of them, wearing large numbered placards around their necks so they could be identified.’
Erotic Politicians and Mullahs
Hanif Kureishi
‘Strangely, anti-British remarks made me feel patriotic, though I only felt patriotic when I was away from England.’
A Letter to my Sons: War’s End
Heinrich Böll
‘No, it's not easier for you than it was for us: don't let them tell you otherwise.’
October, 1948
Kazuo Ishiguro
‘I remember looking around me with approval that first night, and today, for all the changes which have transformed the world around it, Mrs Kawakamu's remains as pleasing as ever.’
A Queer Streak Part One: Anonymous Letters
Alice Munro
‘She would never know why she had done it. She was sleepless and strung-up and her better judgement had deserted her.’
Fiction by Alice Munro.
Herself in Love
Marianne Wiggins
‘She thought, Love is a Revelation, like a religion, some religions; like Islam.’
My Mother’s Life (Part Two)
Doris Lessing
‘‘No, you can not,’ said my mother, ‘we can't afford it.’ Prophets are never appreciated by their nearest and dearest.’
Italo Calvino
John Updike
‘Post-modernism, if it can be said to exist at all, had in Calvino its most seductive showman.’
Excesses
Oliver Sacks
‘Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy: hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania.’
Amazon
Dorothea Lynch & Eugene Richards
‘We women, how in the dark we are about our bodies and what can happen to them. We ask in whispers in the corner at a party or on the telephone, what does a breast lump feel like? What does cancer look like? Will I be all right?’
Bell And Langley
Thomas McMahon
‘He said that new ideas only came to him between these hours, and when they did, they were like recollections of things forgotten. Sometimes he put on his hat and coat at two a. m. and walked ten miles, the way a mourner will do when he is trying to recall the sight of a beloved face.’
The Loves of The Tortoises
Italo Calvino
‘There are two tortoises on the patio: a male and a female. Zlak! Zlak! their shells strike each other. It is the season of their love-making.’
Italo Calvino on animal drive and communication.
Co-operation for the Birds
Lewis Thomas
‘Somehow, despite the internal squabbles and constant competitions, the tree swallow societies manage to get by and survive, year after year.’
The Scientists of Star Wars
William Broad
‘Until 1980 or so I didn't want to have anything to do with nuclear anything. Back in those days I thought there was something fundamentally evil about weapons. Now I see it as an interesting physics problem.’
