Dark Matter

Moving closer to the edge, I peered down. The water was glassy green, extraordinarily clear. I experienced the feeling I sometimes get when I'm on a bridge or a railway platform. Rationally, you know that you've no intention of stepping off the bridge or the platform - or this ice floe - but you're aware that you could, and that the only thing stopping you is your will.

How odd, that light should prevent one from seeing.

If you're warm enough when you set out, you're wearing too many clothes.

I wondered what it must be like to be so handsome. Surely it would affect the behavior of everyone around you, always?

And yet I think I now understand the impulse which drives men to shoot bears. It isn't for the pelt or the meat or the sport - or not only those things. I think they need to do it. They need to kill that great Arctic totem to give them some sense of control over the wilderness - even if that is only an illusion.

I’m twenty-eight years old and I hate my life. I never have the time or the energy to work out how to change it. On Sundays I trail round a museum to keep warm, or lose myself in a library book, or fiddle with the wireless. But Monday’s already looming. And always I’ve got this panicky feeling inside, because I know I’m getting nowhere, just keeping myself alive. Tacked

But young as I was, I suspected that a God who allows such cruelty wouldn’t have cared about bringing it to an end. I

Never been so intensely watched by a creature who would kill me if it got the chance. I stared at it, and I felt death staring back. A

But young as I was, I suspected that a God who allows such cruelty wouldn’t have cared about bringing it to an end. ― Michelle Paver, Dark Matter