Joseph

“I waited for the Earth to stop spinning, for the rift to open and swallow us. Yet the ash tree remained framed in the window, refused to fall. Rain streaked the glass. Blood throbbed in my ears. Preternatural silence. The cruellest April.
I was not deceived. What I saw was samsara, illusion. The world had ended. I was sure of it.”
― John Dolan, A Poison Tree

“Desire is a chameleon.
He blends into the brickwork and the rocks of those lanes and pathways down which we walk. He lurks like a highwayman at the crossroads of our lives, waiting to rob us of our reason.
And he does so for sport.”
― John Dolan, A Poison Tree

“And when the weariness comes and the nights are sleepless, we will tell each other stories of heroism and hope. We will feed on the memories of better times to fill our cold, empty bellies. We will strive to maintain the fiction of the journey without end, even as we see, in the distance, our final destination.”
― John Dolan, A Poison Tree

“Our children form a large part of our Immortality Project. This is one of the reasons a child’s death cuts so deep; some of the future dies with them. Through them and their descendants, part of us lives on forever, just as it does in the friends we touch and the ripples our actions cause in the world. All these effects are conscripts, earthwork defences against the finality of extinction.”
― John Dolan, A Poison Tree