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hopeless questions that dont have answers
most of all i wonder if he felt alone
he hated being alone

last time i was in the old country, i was at this corner shop, and the guy who worked there was like jesi li ti odavde (are you from here), and so i said, pola-pola, hrvatski i norveški, imam obitelj odavde (i have family from here, so then he asked if i was visiting them, my family, but i was just like, theyre ... whats the word (cos i didnt know it), and he said holiday? and i went nah, dead

I deliberately gave the girls the kind of names where they could pick what they wanted to call themselves when they were older, she continues, holding the wine glass so the wine cascades in one neat glide down her throat. I always wondered if Elizabeth might become a Liz, or a Betty, or even a Beth. Same with Catherine. We called her Kitty, but she might have become a Katie or a Cathy or maybe stayed with Catherine.

Both of us have exposed ourselves within that room, with its drapes all over the TV, one of us with words and one of us with inaction, and the vulnerability hangs between us.

“Getting dumped by a therapist on our first day”, Johnny says to fill the silence.

I'm afraid to laugh, afraid to agree.

As they lean against their high-school lockers, he looks into her eyes, holding her shoulders. ‘I don't know what I'm going to do without you, but I don't ever want it to come to that’, he is telling her. I laugh at the dialogue, but my stomach warms at the kind, concerned way he looks at her.

"What will you cook? Maybe lasagne?" Maia asks, and Cora knows, again, that she has done the right thing, because no child should ever be so used to fitting around a parent that they will suggest the food they like least themselves.

Cora wants to say it matters because sometimes big men feel small inside. Because some people — like Gordon's father — travel through life believing themselves so far beyond improvement, they come to think their children, and their children's children, should all be made in their name. Because sometimes their need to please previous generations is greater than their need to love future ones.

Do you not see the risk? she'd wanted to say. Do you not see that calling our son Gordon might mean he ends up like you? But she couldn't. Because surely that was the point.

If cooking is a funeral, eating is its burial, grace, eulogy.

My grandfather once said that happiness isn't a story.

I thought of him in the way you do when you're young: in the mornings, lying in bed listening to the songbirds, sheets tangled around my legs; when I stood in the kitchen watching the kettle, waiting for it to boil; when I was pruning, grafting, staking, and guying the fruit trees; after work, walking to the streambed and listening to the spring peepers; sitting on our porch <...>. As in, always.

I sang for David then. I've always felt as if what came from my throat and lips was not mine, like I was stealing rather than producing something. This body was mine - <...> the lips and the softening of my tongue that shaped the sound - but what left me, ringing through the crown of my head so my skull felt more bell than corporeal, flooding my ears' timpani, vibrating through my nose, wasn't my own.

“This young woman, she had, I dare say, all the usual accomplishments and virtues? She was graceful? Witty? Vivacious? Capricious? Danced like sunlight? Rode like the wind? Sang like an angel? Embroidered like Penelope? Spoke French, Italian, German, Breton, Welsh and many other languages?”

Mr Norrell said he supposed so. He believed that those were the sorts of things young ladies did nowadays.

Jimmy is at my feet as I write this. He's an old dog now, even if he doesn't know he's either old or a dog. An existential condition which is at times to be envied.

Sir Walter was distressed for money.
I do not mean that he merely lacked for cash. Poverty is one thing. Sir Walter's debts quite another. Miserable situation! - and all the more bitter since it was no fault of his: he had never been extravagant and he bad certainly never been foolish, but he was the son of one imprudent man and the grandson of another. Sir Walter had been born in debt.

It was not that the Ministers were dull-witted - upon the contrary there were some brilliant men among them. Nor were they, upon the whole, bad men; several led quite blameless domestic lives and were remarkably fond of children, music, dogs, landscape painting.

Consider, if you will, a man who sits in his library day after day; a small man of no particular personal attractions. His book is on the table before him. A fresh supply of pens. A knife to cut new nibs, ink, paper, notebooks - all is conveniently to hand. There is always a fire in the room - he cannot do without a fire, he feels the cold. The room changes with the season: he does not.

There was a tall, sensible man in the room called Thorpe, a gentleman with very little magical learning, but a degree of common sense rare in a magician.

Мир был не похож на чудо. Он был будничен, как после сна, когда просыпаешься чем-то озабоченный и нисколько не освеженный.

I do not find it easy to speak of the things that affect me most deeply. But it is good to have told it. It is fixed now. A story that is over.

'All of them. It's on television. They keep the photos on their phones. Nobody ever saw me bare at that age. And I never saw anybody else until I was in the army. I was shy. I was at Dunkirk and I was shy!

'I never knew you were at Dunkirk, lied Mr Jim’s on. (It was a regular untruth - the old man would've been five.) 'What was it like?'