Sevi’s Reviews > Walk the Blue Fields > Status Update

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.

‘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.