Slade House

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.

People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go.

Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes "I woke up and it was all a dream" at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it's a cop-out, it's the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream.

Truth has this habit of changing after the fact, don’t you find?

Bitch’ is a stingless insult these days—it hurts like, I don’t know, a celery-stabbing.

If you don't fit into the system, the system makes life hell.

Do you ever think you might be a different species of human, knitted out of raw DNA in a laboratory like in The Island of Doctor Moreau, and then turned loose to see if you can pass yourself off as normal or not?

Time needs time to be measurable.

Finally, I've reached the grandfather clock. Its face has no hands, only the words TIME IS, TIME WAS, TIME IS NOT. Highly metaphysical; deeply useless.

Tonight feels like a board game co-designed by M. C. Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever.

Coffee’s the elixir of life.

A sprinkle of last-minute despair gives a soul an agreeably earthy aftertaste.

I’m not in the Scouts any more,’ I remind her. Mr Moody our scoutmaster told me to get lost, so I did, and it took the Snowdonia mountain rescue service two days to find my shelter.

Bitch" is a stingless insult these days - it hurts like, I don't know, a celery-stabbing.

What do you do when you're visiting someone's house and their garden starts vanishing?

The only explanation is that my senses, memory, and mind are conspiring against my well-being, and nothing’s scarier than that.

we’ll never give up, never stop looking. Always I wonder. Sometimes I envy the weeping parents of the definitely dead you see on TV. Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.

True, I only properly started talking with Todd half an hour ago, but every instance of undying love was only half an hour young, once upon a time.

But the idea that you can no longer trust your mind, that’s just about the most frightening thing there is. When you mess around with proportion or symmetry, or when doubt is injected into your perception of the laws of physics, your mind ceases to be a refuge. Your mind is no longer a safe house.

A dragonfly settles on a bulrush an inch from my nose. Its wings are like cellophane and Jonah says, “Its wings are like cellophane,” and I say, “I was just thinking that,” but Jonah says, “Just thinking what?” so maybe I just thought he’d said it. Valium rubs out speech marks and pops thought-bubbles. I’ve noticed it before.

No one’s ever very sure if doves and pigeons are the same bird or not.

When you die, your soul crosses the Dusk between life and the Blank Sea. The journey takes forty-nine days,

Grief’s a bastard, it really is—pardon my French. It makes everything else harder.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven

Her professional conscience is a collar. I hold the leash.

Places change you, Miss Timms, and deserts change us pale northerners so much, our own mothers wouldn’t recognize us.

It’s cold and clammy in the alley like White Scar Cave in the Yorkshire Dales. Dad took me when I was ten. I find a dead cat lying on the ground at the first corner. It’s gray like dust on the moon. I know it’s dead because it’s as still as a dropped bag, and because big flies are drinking from its eyes. How did it die? There’s no bullet wound or fang marks, though its head’s at a slumped angle so maybe it was strangled by a cat-strangler. It goes straight into the Top Five of the Most Beautiful Things I’ve Ever Seen. Maybe there’s a tribe in Papua New Guinea who think the droning of flies is music. Maybe I’d fit in with them. “Come along, Nathan.” Mum’s tugging my sleeve.