The Colour

This is the state to which I shall aspire, where what is important to me is already mine.

He saw only that misery could be endured in the midst of misery. But set adjacent to the good fortune of others, it became far, far harder to bear.

For it seemed to her that to know everything about another was very hell, that marriage was a wretched state if this was what it entailed. What human soul, bared to nakedness, does not look hideous – her own included? What fool society decreed that man-and-wife (so separate and different in their experience of the world and in their very natures) should be as one?

...most of what Man does, moment to moment, is for his imagined future, for the coming time, in which he will be happier than in time present.

She thought that perhaps what she longed to hear was that almost every life was arranged like this, around a void where love should have been and was not, and that her predicament was therefore an ordinary one.

So then Joseph knew that he had no idea how to escape from the darkness closing round him, unless it might be to engineer his own death,...

All life, he thought as he tugged at the boulder, is a flight from mistake to mistake.

When the news of the Scottish find reached Kaniere, forty or fifty miners who had been toiling there for weeks for poor returns decided to cut their losses, buy new licences and make for Kokatahi. In the time that it took them to get to the warden’s office at Hokitika and back, the Scottish strike had been talked up into a ‘homeward bounder’: a discovery so huge that it would change men’s lives at a stroke and enable them to return home as rich men. They came up the river in pairs and groups. They

River on the ferry, Billy swam beside it, and Harriet remembered the donkey and the donkey cart of her first