Mike Lambert

“Marietta was one of those large suburban houses which no family can now afford to occupy. It suggested a personage rather than a house, a minor royalty in flannels. There was so much collar and shirt-front of white balcony. There were top windows like eyes pouched by late rich dining, lower windows like a pair of bellies, the red face whiskered with creepers, the portico enlarged like a drinker's nose.”
― V.S. Pritchett, Mr. Beluncle

“God’s grace is like a weather system, I thought: sunny, or cloudy, sometimes stormy, or an eerie emptiness that might be a prelude to anything, an uncertainty that tests faith.”
― Paul Theroux, My Other Life: A Wry and Deeply Moving Literary Novel of Marriage, Affairs, and Life Across Continents

“Smale was a short, ruddy-faced man whose squarish appearance gave the impression of having been carpentered”
― Paul Theroux, Saint Jack

“The leaves fly down, the rain spits and the clouds flow like a dirty thaw before the wind, which whines and mews in the window cracks and swings the wireless aerial with a dull tap against the sill; the House of Usher is falling, and between now and Hogmanay, as the draughts lift the carpets, as slates shift on the roof and mice patter behind the wainscot, the ghosts, the wronged suitors of our lives, gather in the anterooms of the mind.”
― Paul Theroux, Sunrise with Seamonsters: Travels & Discoveries, 1964-1984