But how fragile is Clara’s atheism! Like one of those tiny glass doves Hortense keeps in the living-room cabinet—a breath would knock it over.
The gathered members of FATE murmured their assent, because this was the kind of sentiment to which they routinely murmured assent.
him.
I don’t call myself anything. I don’t make claims.
Joyce flew into the room like a hippie comet, a great stream of black fringed velvet, caftan, and multiple silk scarves.
And now, as Sir Edmund turned to go back to his estate, he realized that he was in a position to influence the situation—nay, more than that—transform it! Sir Edmund, who was a fairly corpulent man, a man who looked as if he might be hiding another man within him, practically skipped all the way home.
What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way?
(like a man returning to his lover’s bed after a midnight walk),
retina—Pulchritude—beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
Now, there is a level of stoned that you can be, Millat knew, that is just so very very stoned that you reach a level of Zen-like sobriety and come out the other side feeling absolutely tip-top as if you’d never sparked up in the first place.
it is Poppy Burt-Jones herself in the freckled flesh. Sitting cold and determined with her sister, who seems, like all siblings of those we have desired, an uglier, misfeatured version.
Yes! said the anthropomorphized voice that had taken up residence in Samad’s right testicle.
“Well, the Chalfens were behind you—they’re such nice people—intellectuals,” she whispered, as if it were some exotic disease of the tropics. “He’s a scientist and she’s something in gardening—but both very down to earth with it. I talked
Because there aren’t any alien objects or events anymore, just as there aren’t any sacred ones. It’s all so familiar. It’s all on TV. So
It was a competition in agony. Like rich women in posh restaurants ordering ever-smaller salads.
She was that age. Whatever she said burst like genius into centuries of silence. Whatever she touched was the first stroke of its kind. Whatever she believed was not formed by faith but carved from certainty. Whatever she thought was the first time such a thought had ever been thunk.
His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out,
It was important, in Hortense’s presence, never to admit to illness. The cure, as in most Jamaican households, was always more painful than the symptoms.
An insult was but a pebble in his path, only proving the intellectual inferiority of she who threw it.
“Pardon him. He feel strongly because he is young.
Between Marcus’s talk and Mickey’s commentary, it’s like watching two TVs at once. Very informative.
During this exchange, Irie tried to concentrate on Oscar, now creating an ouroboros from a big pink elephant by stuffing the trunk into its own rear end. She’d never been so close to this strange and beautiful thing, the middle class, and experienced the kind of embarrassment that is actually intrigue, fascination. It was both strange and wondrous. She felt like the prude who walks through a nudist beach, examining the sand. She felt like Columbus meeting the exposed Arawaks, not knowing where to look.
Alsana had decided to stop speaking directly to her husband. Through the next eight years she would determine never to say yes to him, never to say no to him, but rather to force him to live like she did—never knowing, never being sure, holding Samad’s sanity to ransom, until she was paid in full with the return of her number-one-son-eldest-by-two-minutes, until she could once more put a chubby hand through his thick hair.
It’s just like on TV! And that is the most superlative compliment Archie can think of for any real-life event.
Self-hatred makes a man turn on the first person he sees.
