Sevi > Recent Status Updates

A thought occurs:
What she insists is fact
is often dreamt at a slant.
From a constable’s testimony,
she extrapolates a scene
of sisterly laughter,
failing to see the medical bags
in both bicycle baskets, and
a stranger’s refusal to believe
that two girls could possibly
be hurrying to a patient’s side.

For most of the time people crazy or sober were stumbling in the dark, reaching with outstretched hands for something they didn’t even know they wanted.

Stack, like every man who has never known a woman, believed he knew a great deal about women.

Putting the past into words seemed idle when the past had already happened. The past was treacherous, moving slowly along. It would catch up in its own time. And in any case, what could be done? Remorse altered nothing and grief just brought it back.

‘You never in your married life made sauce.’
‘Do you know, Victor Deegan, neither did you.’

She said self-knowledge lay at the far side of speech. The purpose of conversation was to find out what, to some extent, you already knew. She believed that in every conversation, an invisible bowl existed. Talk was the art of placing decent words into the bowl and taking others out. In a loving conversation, you discovered yourself in the kindest possible way, and at the end the bowl was, once again, empty.

It is three years since anyone one touched him and the tenderness in the stranger’s hands alarms him. Why is tenderness so much more disabling than injury?

It’s what she once wanted but two people hardly ever want the same thing at any given point in life. It is sometimes the hardest part of being human.

There’s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.

Whatever you say, I’ll manage. I will live out of a water barrel and check the skies. I will learn fifteen types of wind and know the weight of ttomorrow’s rain by the rustle in the sycamores. Make nettle soup and dandelion bread, ask for nothing. And I won’t comfort you. I will not be the woman who shelters her man same as he’s a boy. That part of my people ends with me.

I was your Christmas fling, a thing to break the boredom of the holidays, and you were mine. But now these suitcases have the weight of anchors on this floor I learned to walk on. It may be I’m back for good.

A snarl of angry yellow taxis clotted the intersections on the streets below.

She talked as if she could reach out through the past and touch it with her hands.

She heard them falling, imagined the stem weakening, the fruit clinging to its source, losing, loosening, letting go, falling, falling.

There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.

The others thought me simply wonderful and of course it would have been very nice for them to have me. But I’m everything you most dislike and disapprove of, and yet you couldn’t withstand me! My vanity couldn’t hold out against that. It’s so much nicer to be a secret and delightful sin to anybody than to be a feather in their cap.

your dad would spend hours standing on the embankment, crazy with worry, he would leave a light on in the hall in case you came home because he knew you became afraid once the farm put on its nightgown and buttoned it up to the chin

the dead stole the show, they were met with endless applause, yes, god almighty, we clapped our hands to bits.

I often wondered whether I was the reason you so obsessively longed for what you were so keen to escape, I had stolen something from you – your childhood, you could never get it back

I no longer wanted to so venomously declare the war of lust against you, I wanted to keep you whole, not riddled with bullets

while bursting into the odd skip and jump that was no longer the silly skipping of a carefree young creature, I’d ripped that carefreeness out from between your bones while I’d have liked nothing better than to preserve it, but you grew out of my clutches and into my heart’s desires

I drove off and didn’t see you trying to skip, you were trying to skip but you couldn’t, not like before.

"a writer trained as a lawyer who escaped his imprisonment there in 1621 by hiding in a chest of books" - Hugo Grotius, Loevestein Castle

you thought so deeply about things that even I couldn’t keep up with you after a while, you were underwater and it was hard for me to reach you, you were the bird who would later become famous, you were my prey

That obstinate summer, you lay like a breached calf in the nursery of my degenerate desires, I was madness’s accomplice, I didn’t know how not to desire you, you, my darling chosen one

He resolved not to let it slip, but to set before the People in glaring colours how enormous were the abuses but too frequently practised in Monasteries, and how unjustly public esteem was bestowed indiscriminately upon all who wore a religious habit. He longed for the moment destined to unmask the Hypocrites, and convince his Countrymen that a sanctified exterior does not always hide a virtuous heart.

It is not virtue which makes you reject my offer: You WOULD accept it, but you dare not. ’Tis not the crime which holds your hand, but the punishment;

They who are conscious of Mankind’s perfidy and selfishness, ever receive an obligation with apprehension and distrust: They suspect that some secret motive must lurk behind it: They express their thanks with restraint and caution, and fear to praise a kind action to its full extent, aware that some future day a return may be required.

But words
are a strange docile wheat are they not, they bend
to the ground.