eloquent overspill

I am harvesting more quotes from my current reading than I can sow into my Booker blog. The extras will not be cast aside. They will appear here -


‘They flutter like dreaming eyes, delicate parts removed from the machine of sleep. They fall from the sparrow tree, soft fruit of their bones. Sparrows mating, fine clocks mating, begetting time, which scatters at angles, always at angles.’

‘Love occupied the spaces between, worries the edges of their consciousness like a song neither could quite remember.’

‘But this is the unreal place, the place at the heart of things, where there is no fake eccentricity instead of real madness, where, it seems to me, everything is trapped somehow, and has to struggle just not to become grotesque.’

Naeem Murr



‘Once you locked into language, all you could do was shuffle the greasy pack of a few thousand words that millions of people had used before.’

‘Neglected meanings piled up like unopened letters. She knew they contained ever more threatening reminders that her life was unexamined.’

Edward St Aubyn


‘I don’t know why somebody spending their time thinking would surprise anybody. There are thousands of thing to think about. When it comes to thinking, like is like a giant amusement park. When you walk into the park, you should want to go on all the rides.’

‘I stare at his black hair and the way it slides smoothly over the shoulders of his jacket. He must be made at least partly of silk.’

M. J. Hyland

a couple of quotes

‘Innocence is like blindness - all your other senses are heightened in compensation.’

‘I longed for the sleep I had known in childhood : the deep bath of nothingness, the black sea of innocence.’

Sam Taylor

in your darkest hour I'll be there for you

I haven’t spent much time with Ted Bundy since the late 80’s. I haven’t looked at pictures of him since I saw him shaved and fried and laid out on the slab. Until a recent documentary reintroduced me to my old friend.

Through this I heard how, the night before his execution, he met with an eminent christian and accused pornography of leading him astray.

How convenient - for both Bundy and america. That both should have a reason, an explanation, an excuse. A path which could lead this educated, handsome and charming man to the pastime of bludgeoning, strangulation and mutilation of over 30 people.

How much safer we can sleep at night if we know that as long as we steer clear of those sweaty images we wont be tempted to pick up the unidentified blunt instrument.

How much nicer than wondering if there could be a little dark spark flickering inside any of us, just waiting for someone or something to fan it into life.