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A Conversation Piece
George Steiner
‘No. Listen to me. God's confidence in Abraham was not total. Let me hammer out my meaning.’
Punishable Innocence
Breyten Breytenbach
‘Here I live now in an old house next to a mourning autumn tree. How I got here I shall never be able to explain.’
Paramilitarism in Costa del Burger
Todd McEwen
‘So I got on my bicycle. Bicycle of Pain. I pedalled slowly agonizingly slowly away from the house.’
Eddie-baby
Eddie Limonov
‘Usually taciturn and self-absorbed, on that day Eddie bombarded the teachers with witticisms and cheeky, caustic remarks, for which the French mistress, shaken, sent him out of the classroom.’
Alpes Maritimes
William Boyd
‘From the small terrace at Cherry's villa there is a perfect view of Villefranche and its bay, edged by the bright beads of the harbour lights and headlamps of cars on the coast road.’
Weaning
Adam Mars-Jones
‘As he grew up he would drink, and likewise urinate, without embarrassment. Snacks, so long as they were light and informal, were liquids: casual and seemly.’
Miracles
Josef Škvorecký
‘It was already dusk, a conspicuously symbolic black cloud was rising in the east, lit from the opposite direction by the orange and gold rays of the sun wreathed in a Technicolor sunset.’
A Question of Geography
John Berger & Nella Bielski
‘If I'm not transferred to the mines, I'll hold out, and you must go on thinking of me as dead: you will be closer, my heart, to the reality.’
Coming down from the Mountains
Reinaldo Arenas
‘There is nothing to be heard now; just, in the darkness, the racket of the victrolas in Loma Colorada barrio, and the organ lording it over all the other noises.’
Jane Somers’s Diaries
Doris Lessing
‘I had never thought that before, never felt life in that way, as I did then; washing Maudie Fowler, a fierce angry old woman.’
A Wedding
Anita Brookner
‘The bride and groom were there all the time, in the centre, as they should be. A good-looking couple. But lifeless, figures from stock.’
The Time Sickness
Martin Amis
‘Before me through the restraining bars, the sunset sprawls in its polluted pomp, full of genies, cloaked ghosts, crimson demons of the middle sky.’
A Conversation with the Head of Orpheus
Russell Hoban
‘Far, far away in the night are live human beings whose breathing can be heard as they speak, and they're looking at their illuminated dials as I look at mine at this end of the darkness that curves with the night miles to the heave and swell of the ocean dawn.’
