Amanda Longhurst

“More and more, he found landscape and the landmarks within it sucking him back into past conversations, ghost feelings, old ambiences. It went beyond that, though. Even without the power of an evocative image as a trigger, he was able to spend whole hours – sometimes longer – swimming in a vanished event or afternoon.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“At the club, nicknames stuck like dog hair to merino wool. A wiry, anxious weekend player called Phil who’d once missed a crucial putt when he was distracted by the call of a skein of Canada geese overhead was thereafter known to all as ‘Quack’. Carl Marchwell, who was infamous for telling all of his playing companions in great detail about his week and lacked the skill of self-editing, hadn’t been called ‘Carl’ by anybody at the club for years; he was always ‘Jackanory’. Ian Welcombe, who liked to bet big money on foursome matches but had never, to anybody’s knowledge, actually won, was ‘The Bank’. Jill, Ian’s wife – one of the few female members of the club who actually seemed to enjoy the game – was not ‘Jill’ but ‘Mrs Bank’. Recently I’d overheard people talking about somebody called ‘Jam Jar’ but I was yet to find out who that was.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“Social fissures spread out in all sorts of unanticipated ways. Making snap judgements online about the lives and personalities of people you’d never met had already been a fashionable form of stupidity for quite some time, but now it became an international sport. Fear leaked while people weren’t looking, crept through tiny gaps under doors and puddled. ‘It’s scary out there,’ people said. ‘Stay safe.’ But much of the time it felt like the problem wasn’t out there at all, it was in there, in the screens that everybody carried with them everywhere they went and nobody could stop looking at.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“The sun slowly dying, the spiral arm spreading, the molecules drifting apart second by second toward our inevitable heat death—shouldn’t we all wail to the stars?”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less