The Progress of Love

This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.

He seemed happy. She thought that she seldom concerned herself about Laurence’s being happy. She wanted him to be in a good mood, so that everything would go smoothly, but that was not the same thing.

People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people might not think so. They do not care.

Not much to her credit to go through her life thinking, Well, good, now that’s over, that’s over. What was she looking forward to, what bonus was she hoping to get, when this, and this, and this, was over?  Freedom -- or not even freedom.  Emptiness, a lapse of attention.  It seemed all the time that she was having to provide a little more -- in the way of attention, enthusiasm, watchfulness -- than she was sure she had.  She was straining, hoping not to be found out.

I could see a nostril, an ear, plugged up with greenish mud. . . . I don't think I really saw all this. . . . I must have heard someone talking about that and imagined that I saw it.

A simple serpent! . . we used to call ourselves simple serpents. Civil serpents. Servants.

I'm just a civil servant. We take the taxpayer's money and try not to do any work at all.

It seems so much the truth it is the truth; it's what I believe.

When I stood apart from my parents at Steve Gauley's funeral and watched them, and had this new, unpleasant feeling about them, I thought that I was understanding something about them for the first time. It was a deadly serious thing. I was understanding they were implicated. Their big, stiff, dressed-up bodies did not stand between me and sudden death, or any kind of death. They gave consent. So it seemed. They gave consent to the death of children and to my death not by anything they said or thought but by the very fact that they had made children - they had made me. They had made me, and for that reason my death - however grieved they were, however they carried on - would seem to them anything but impossible or unnatural. This was a fact, and even then I knew they were not to blame.

El invierno cae con dureza sobre el campo, se asienta en él como la capa de hielo de tres metros de profundidad hace miles de años. La gente vive envuelta en el invierno de un modo que los extraños no comprenden. Mantienen una actitud precavida, previsora, tranquila, animosa.

Isn't it true that all the people I know in the world so far are hardly more than puppets for me, serving the glossy contrivings of my imagination?