Status Updates From Lessons

'Three young heads brimming with goodness and courage sliced from their bodies.'

Memories had a long half-life.

They weren't there, they can't know. The fear! Now it's history it's no longer real. It's just words now. They don't realize how young we were. They can't understand the pure feeling we had. Journalists today are atheists. They don't want to know how strong our religious faith was.'

There was no radioactive dust. It was madness. He knew that. His circumstances were mad and he can do as he liked.

Also, a respect for order derived from his father insisted that what was started must be finished.

He was waiting for existence to part like a curtain, for a hand to extend and help him step through into a paradise regained.

A clean and ordered home remained her passion.

'Red and green, his mother said, should never be seen.'

But he was the mass. He would be treated like the idiot he always was.

'Self-consciousness was the death of a notebook.'

'This was how most messes were cleared, smoothed thin to invisibility.'

Seamus Heaney once said that a writer's duty was to turn up at the desk. Whenever the baby slept in the day Roland turned up and waited and often, head on the desk, slept too.

I had a sergeant who used to say that where there's people there's a crime scene.
Sounds like complete nonsense

'The self-made hell was an interesting construct. Nobody escaped making one, at least one, in a lifetime. Some lives were nothing but.'
'But Roland often thought about it. You built a torture machine and climbed inside.

'the black notes, the clear white ones you held for longer, the grubby dog-eared double page that was his own special punishment. None of it now looked familiar or even unfriendly.'

'She loved him, so the blame must be his and it was sweet of her to tell him in her note that it was not. He didn't know which defective part of himself to indict, so it must be all of him.'

'He hated her progressively and every thought was a repeat, a variation on the theme of her self-loving desertion.'