Mark

“We rode along in silence, thinking our private thoughts. Charlie and I had an unspoken agreement not to throw ourselves into speedy travel just after a meal. There were many hardships to our type of life and we took these small comforts as they came; I found they added up to something decent enough to carry on”
― Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers

“She sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“And as we walk back down the street, me gingerly clutching what at this point constitutes my entire collection, my father says, ‘One day, when you’re all grown up and I’m not here any more, you’ll remember the sunny day we went to the market together and bought a boat.’ My throat feels tight because, as soon as he says it, I am already there. Standing on another street, without my father, trying to get back. And yet I’m here, with him. So I try to soak up every aspect of the moment, to help me get back when I need to. I feel the weight of the chunky parcel under my arm, and the warmth of the sun, and my father’s hand in mine. I smell the flowers with their sharp undertang of cheap hot dog, and taste the slick of toffee on my teeth, and hear the chattering hagglers. I feel the joy of an adventurous Saturday with my father and no school, and I feel the sadness of looking back when it is all gone. When he is gone.”
― Victoria Coren, For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker

“Gloria Anzaldúa, who revolutionised the Chicana writing of her generation, called the border ‘una herida abierta – an open wound – where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds. And before a scab forms, it haemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two countries merging to form a third country – a border culture.”
― Ed Vulliamy, Amexica: War Along the Borderline