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The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five
We asked ourselves if we had grown into the habit of seeing ourselves falsely. But how could it be wrong to approve our own harmonies, the wealths and pleasantness of our land?

4 ♥

Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
At first you are allowed only glimpses of circles, triangles, squares, all a luminous white on flat white, and the shapes darken, turn grey and then duller grey on a white that begins to shine, though softly. These statements of order remain, so that the eye may travel, but resting, soothed, reassured; soon, however, the mind begins to protest against changelessness, longs for relief, and as you understand that this is your thought – a hunger transmuted from a sharp need into the passionless stuff of the mind – the eye is in movement again because up there, at the very top of the dim shaft, it is not polygons but polyhedrons you are trying to encompass with your gaze. They stand there, as it were waiting in the air, but their solidity is not yet defined and heavy, and you still believe it is a hexagon or an octagon that is enticing your gaze up into itself. But no, there is mass, and there is weight on the faintly gleaming white. Silence and stillness, no movement at all, for a long time, a long…

2 ♥

The Bell
Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason. The absent Paul, haunting her with letters and telephone bells and imagined footsteps on the stairs had begun to be the greater torment. Dora suffered from guilt, and with guilt came fear. She decided at last that the persecution of his presence was to be preferred to the persecution of his absence.

1 ♥

Italian Fever
Lucy placed her frog paperweight carefully on the pages and stalked off to the kitchen. To read on, she would need a cup of herbal tea, a glass of water, and two aspirin. The book was awful. DV’s books were always awful, but what made this one worse than the others was the introduction of a new element, which was bound to boost sales: There was a ghost in the villa. DV had gone gothic. It wasn’t enough that the unsuspecting Italians must succumb to the bold and original charms of the devastated American writer; now he was haranguing the dead as well.

6 ♥

Hester Among the Ruins
So I keep looking. Maybe there’s a clue in these newspaper clippings, and I stare at words which I don’t understand, as if there’s a coded message in them which will reveal itself to me. As if I’m expecting to see a swastika emerge in a pattern. It has to be here. I must find it. Somewhere in this box there is dirt or blood. It has to be.

11 ♥

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
With the approach of autumn, a layer of long golden fur grows over their bodies. Golden in the purest sense of the word, with not the least intrusion of another hue. Theirs is a gold that comes into this world as gold and exists in this world as gold. Poised between all heaven and earth, they stand steeped in gold.

1 ♥

The Handmaid’s Tale
The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains. Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say, quoting another Center motto, warning us away from such objects. And they were right, it is envy. Just holding it is envy. I envy the Commander his pen. It’s one more thing I would like to steal.

8 ♥

The Year of the Flood
Beware of words. Be careful what you write. Leave no trails.
This is what the Gardeners taught us, when I was a child among them. They told us to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on. The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumble away, computers could be destroyed. Only the Spirit lives forever, and the Spirit isn’t a thing.
As for writing, it was dangerous, said the Adams and the Eves, because your enemies could trace you through it, and hunt you down, and use your words to condemn you.
But now that the Waterless Flood has swept over us, any writing I might do is safe enough, because those who would have used it against me are most likely dead. So I can write down anything I want.

21 ♥

Oryx and Crake
“Hang on to the words,” he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

6 ♥

Giovanni’s Room
My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.

26 ♥

The Wide Sargasso Sea
I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.

6 ♥

Fahrenheit 451
Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests.

24 ♥

Passing
Irene’s lips trembled almost uncontrollably, but she made a desperate effort to fight back her disastrous desire to laugh again, and succeeded. Carefully selecting a cigarette from the lacquered box on the tea-table before her, she turned an oblique look on Clare and encountered her peculiar eyes fixed on her with an expression so dark and deep and unfathomable that she had for a short moment the sensation of gazing into the eyes of some creature utterly strange and apart. A faint sense of danger brushed her, like the breath of a cold fog.

10 ♥

Woman On The Edge Of Time
The dream was like those paper dolls, the only dolls she had had as a child, dolls with blond paper hair and Anglo features and big paper smiles. That she knew in her heart of ashes the dream was futile did not make it less precious. Every soul needs a little sweetness.

2 ♥

You Must Remember This
Once there was Enid Maria and there was Angel-face but Enid Maria knew very little about Angel-face while Angel-face knew everything about Enid Maria. Sometimes for the sheer hell of it Angel-face scrambled Enid Maria’s bureau drawers to confuse her, mislaid her homework to terrify her, lost her library books so she’d have to pay a fine; she even, sometimes, punished Enid Maria by losing her lunch money - you can do without, you don’t deserve to eat. Enid understood it was dangerous to walk along a busy street in Angel-face’s company because Angel-face might decide suddenly, whimsically, to cross the street - smiling and doing any damn thing she pleased. And she could get away with it!

6 ♥

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