READING

'Reading in old age is doing for me what it has always done - it frees me from the closet of my own mind. Reading fiction, I see through the prism of another person's understanding; reading everything else, I am travelling - I am travelling in the way that I still can: new sights, new experiences. I am reminded sometimes of the intensity of childhood reading, that absolute absorption when the very ability to read was a heady new gain, the gateway to a different place, to a parallel universe you hadn't known was there. The one entirely benign mind-altering drug. Except of course for those who ban or burn books, in which benign doesn't come into it, but the power of books is all the more acknowledged.

So I have my drug, perfectly legal and I don't need a prescription.' 

Penelope Lively, Ammonites and Leaping Fish, p.36. 

MEMORY

'...memory - the vapour trail without which which we are undone...' 

Penelope Lively, Ammonites & Leaping Fish, p.5. 

A LIFE HAS CONTEXT

'A lifetime is embedded; it does not float free, it is tethered - to certain decades, to places, to people. It has a context; each departure leaves a person-shaped void - the absence within a family, the presence lost within a house, in a community, in society itself. We go, but hang on for a while in other people's heads - something we said, something we did; we leave a ghostly imprint on our backdrop. A very few people go one further and are distilled into a blue plaque on a building.' 

Penelope Lively, Ammonites & Leaping Fish: A Life in Time, p.3. 

LIFE IS THIRST

'Cavanaugh, lifting his wineglass, talked to it. "Life," he said. Then said, "Life is thirst." Nobody was listening. He drank his thirst.'

Leonard Michaels, The Men's Club, p.84. 

"MOVING ON"

'Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because

any sensible person knows grief is a long-term

project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon

us let no man slow or speed or fix.' 

Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, p.99. 

LOVING KINDNESS

'They offer me a space on the sofa next to them
and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like
appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself
because they are so kind and keep regenerating and
recharging their kindness without any input from me.'
Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, p.46.  

MEN & WOMEN

'She told us that men were rarely truly
kind, but they were often funny, which
is better. "You would do well to prepare
yourselves for disappointment" she said,
"in your dealings with men. Women are on
the whole much stronger, usually cleverer"
she said, "but less funny which is a shame..."
Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, p.33. 

CHILDHOOD GRIEF

'Holiday and school became the same.'
Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, p.14. 

CHILDHOOD GRIEF

'....every crayon, tractor, coat, welly, covered in a film of grief...'
Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, p.9. 

JESUS

'He is our mouth, through which we speak to the Father; he is our eye, through which we see the Father; he is our right hand, through which we offer ourselves to the Father. Unless he intercedes, there is no intercourse with God either for us or for all saints.' 

Ambrose in John Calvin, Institues of the Christina Religion 2 (Edited by John T McNeill) p.879.