‘She could see, or was starting to, that someone out there was seeing him, watching him.’
When George’s father died, he neglected to tell his therapist, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal, except she could cop a mood, and she knew how to punish him with a vicious show of boredom.
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Doctors, solitude and the stones within us – for fiction about isolation, it has to be Haruki Murakami. Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin.
‘Things have changed without seeking permission.’ A plague diary of this March, by Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn.
‘Our view of the morning’s entertainment was restricted by the width of the door frame.’ Bruce Chatwin writes about his imprisonment during a coup in Benin.
‘A leech bodes this: you will, sooner or later, overflow yourself. ’ Rebecca Giggs on leeches and the borders of the human body.
‘Her eyes fluttered open and I felt like I was at the edge of the mouth of a cave, with every intention of jumping in.’ For pure escapism, lose yourself in the nineteenth-century Paris of Carmen Maria Machado.
‘One purpose of art is to get us to wake up, recalibrate our emotional life, get ourselves into proper relation to reality.’
‘The tally, indeed, on that particular activity, in that particular location – or, in fact, on any couch ever – was, indeed, zero.’
‘The coronavirus seemed to demand immediate responses to the questions we’d been struggling with for years.’
‘Sometimes we could not see / anything before us. That’s what it / required.’
‘Connections are being forged, even as we keep our distance. Let’s hold onto them in the after.’
Jessica Francis Kane on neighbourliness in the time of COVID-19.
‘Outside, a technicolour sunset is giving way to the silvery sweep of searchlights, as a hand tugs the blackout curtain across the sky.’
