The Coroner's Lunch

He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He'd put it in almost fifty years before and hadn't had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn't find it.

There was nothing fake or added about him. He was all himself.

Do you suppose it all means something? That we're being left clues? Perhaps. Then, no offense, but I fear they've badly overestimated us.

This skin, this hair, all this outside stuff. It isn't me. It's just my package. It's like the wrapper around the sweet; it isn't the sweet itself. What we really are is all inside the package. All our feelings. All our good moods and bad moods. All our ideas, our cleverness, our love, that's what a person really is.

He’d come to believe two conflicting ideas with equal conviction: that communism was the only way man could be truly content; and that man, given his selfish ways, could never practice communism with any success. The natural product of these two views was that man could never be content. History, with its procession of disgruntled political idealists, tended to prove him right.

Dtui with her laundry-bin build was off the scale. There were no suitors queuing at her door. They wouldn’t have to dig deep to find her kindness and humour, but they didn’t even bring a spade.

The current philosophy was that Buddha was a communist.

Encounters with the living always drained him more than those with the dead.

Watching Siri and Dtui 'run' to the administration block would have saddened even the most benevolent of athletic coaches

Siri's dream world had always been bizarre. In his childhood, the images that lurked there constantly interrupted his sleep. The same woman who raised him would come to his bed and remind him that these were his dreams inside his head, and nobody had more right to be in there than he. He learned how to walk tall through his nightmares and not be afraid of what happened there.

Somchai Asanajinda says as long as your heart can still beat for one, it can always beat for two.

He was a doctor and she was a woman with an infirmity. There were no drugs to calm her anger, so he had to use the most natural therapy he could find: compassion.

He passed the fountain whose spouts had become cave dwellings for insects,

There was nothing fake or added or subtracted about him. He was all himself.