Quote 1: “The beauty of this city is too elemental, too fecund and raw, to be tamed by mere money. Though the financiers and bankers and dot.com millionaires hug the shoreline, their topiary palaces and towered developments will never conquer this landscape. Bougainvillea and wisteria, ficus and monstera treat is all just as food and trellis and will, if unchecked, devour the lot. And there, smack in the middle, the sparkling, billowing harbour – the earth is alive here. This beauty is a force, and it will never lose.”
Quote 2: “In the night I woke… I put on a robe and went downstairs, across the empty terrace with its cleared tables, across the promenade, down the stone steps to the lake. The black water opened in silver ripples to let me in. It was cool, but it was the consistency of silk, water with moon in it. It wrapped around my new body, to my chin. I was liberated now, from preciousness and sniggered mystery. I was a known quantity to myself, free to do with that whatever I liked.”
Quote 3: “…at their age the girls were more interested in love, of course. They imagined, because I had been married and unmarried, that I had a scandalous degree of experience. They believed I taught them Goethe’s poetry of desire as if I could vouch for it. None of us – teacher or taught – realised how an imagined romantic life can sustain you as a possibility, a hope, and remain just that. Like parallel train tracks, it runs alongside, but will never meet, the life you are living.”
Quote 4: “One summer day on Primrose Hill we lay on the grass, our backs curved to the spine of the earth. The sky was pale as a cup. If you pressed your skull to the soft ground and closed your eyes the whole city could fall away. The air above my face was honeyed and heavy with dandelion parts, tiny midges that could not but dance. Sounds reached us divorced of their makers: a woman’s laugh, a baby’s bleat, an animal groan from the zoo. We felt the planet turn.”
Quote 5: “Freud was in vogue then, and Hans made a remark about our true inner beast being on display… I did not think we were all bestial inside… I wondered whether it wasn’t the other way around; whether inside all of us there might just be a cleaner, purer, more hairless version too naked for the world.”
Quote 6: “This vast life – the real, interior one in which we remain linked to the dead (because the dream inside us ignores trivialities like breath, or absence) – this vast life is not under our control. Everything we have seen and everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot see and whose effects we cannot know. One slub here, a dropped stitch there, a bump encounter in that place, and the whole fabric will be different once it is woven.”
