Думаю, он это сделал довольно неуклюже, но в то время неуклюжесть мужчины считалась признаком искренности.

Первая неделя октября. Время доставать шерсть из нафталина; время ночных туманов, росы, скользких ступенек и последних цветов; последнего броска львиного зева и оборчатой красно-лиловой капусты — прежде такую не разводили, а теперь она повсюду. Время хризантем, похоронных цветов — белых. Как они, должно быть, надоели покойникам.

Незаработанный доход поддерживает жалость к себе в тех, у кого имеется к ней склонность.

В жизни трагедия - не бесконечный вопль. Она еще и то, что ей предшествует.

Что за радость смотреть, как танцуют другие, если не можешь танцевать сам.

Но невыплаканные слезы могут отравить. И воспоминания тоже. И молчание. Пошли плохие ночи. Я не могла спать.

Богов у них было много. Лишние боги никогда не помешают, они оправдывают почти все.

Рини говорила, что Бог делает людей, как она – хлеб, поэтому у матерей, когда они ждут детишек, растут животики: поднимается тесто.

That’s the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to its logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies. Birth, copulation, and death. No exceptions, except maybe for the copulation part of it. Some guys don’t even get that far, poor sods.

Voices on the street outside, unknown languages. I will always remember this, she tells herself. Then: Why am I thinking about memory? It’s not then yet, it’s now. It’s not over.

So this is marriage, I thought: this shared tedium, this twitchiness, and those little powdery runnels forming to the sides of the nose.

People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.

It was as if the illuminated dome of the Royal York Hotel had been wrenched off and I was being stared at by a malign presence located somewhere above the black spangled empty surface of the sky. It was God, looking down with his blank, ironic searchlight of an eye. He was observing me; he was observing my predicament; he was observing my failure to believe in him. There was no floor to my room: I was suspended in the air, about to plummet. My fall would be endless – endlessly down.

Nothing I can recall, but is what I remember the same thing as what actually happened?

It is now: I am the only survivor.

We were two good little Samaritans, lifting out of the ditch the man fallen among thieves. We were Mary and Martha, ministering to – well, not Jesus, even Laura did not go that far, but it was obvious which of us she had cast in these roles. I was to be Martha, keeping busy with household chores in the background; she was to be Mary, laying pure devotion at Alex’s feet. (Which does a man prefer? Bacon and eggs, or worship? Sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending how hungry he is.)

“So true,” said Miss Violence, with a sigh. But she sighed about everything. She fit into Avilion very well – into its obsolete Victorian splendours, its air of aesthetic decay, of departed grace, of wan regret. Her attitudes and even her faded cashmeres went with the wallpaper.

Where was I? I turn back the page: the war is still raging. Raging is what they used to say, for wars; still do, for all I know. But on this page, a fresh, clean page, I will cause the war to end – I alone, with a stroke of my black plastic pen. All I have to do is write: 1918. November 11. Armistice Day.