Amanda Craig

Very happy or unhappy, people disappear.

That is the worst thing about despair: it is not constant, any more than love is.

Some people, perhaps those with more dignity and less rage gnawing at the roots of their being, are nicer as failures, For me, it was like descending a deep pit that had no bottom

The sudden acquisition of power does not go to the head, but to the groin. In some, it promotes lust; in others, supplants it. Those on whom its effect is purely cerebral may indeed be counted as fortunate.

What frightened me most was, I could no longer believe in my own life as a story. Everyone needs a story, a part to play in order to avoid the realization that life is without significance. How else do any of us survive? It__ what makes life bearable, even interesting. When it becomes neither, people say you__e lost the plot. Or just lost it.

It__ all biology. If it weren__ for two thousand years of the Christian tradition we wouldn__ think of pretending otherwise_Romance is the true opiate of the masses.

There was a certain usefulness in having a husband whom most people could barely tolerate: it deflected envy, for one thing.

Mostly, what people mean by love is laziness.

I had been much more in love with my wife than she with me, that was all. Somehow, you were supposed to be ashamed of this, as though love were a perpetual jostling for the roles of pursuer and pursued. As if it didn__ take more courage to admit that someone held your hopes of happiness in their hands. As if it were a choice.

He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. It is the sound of millions and millions of creatures living and struggling and dying and being born. It commands those who hear it to eat or be eaten..

Every profession is an island whose inhabitants earn a precarious living by taking in each other__ washing.

Each morning the light came through the slats of the shutters in ripples, and as it washed towards the inhabitants of the Casa Luna it smoothed away memories of the past, It was for this that they had endured long hours in the grey English winter or freezing American climes, for this that they had worked and planned and worked extra hours/ The horrible feelings of stress, tension, anger and frustration that coursed through their veins every day almost unnoticed began to fade.

It__ unthinkable, now to live as her parents had done, going to work from nine to five and enjoying the benefits of the newly-formed health and education services. What paradise it had seemed! Now, in order to pay their exorbitant mortgages, and ever more exorbitant fuel prices, British adults have to work long hours _ the longest, it is said, in Europe_ Everyone they know, everyone they see, is just like them, living in houses like these, reading the same papers, seeing the same films and TV programmes and plays, buying from the same shops and sending their children to the same schools; and they think it will go on for ever, either ever-mounting property prices cushioning them. But it can__.

Few pretty and privileged young women really understand the essential injustice of biology...For most of her life as a woman, the rules were perfectly clear cut: other women were the enemy, and all love was war. She had rejected feminism, quite openly, as a crutch for the envious and ugly, and regarded married women as holding the upper hand if, unlike her own mother, they had any strength of character. The weaknesses and dependencies imposed by fecundity had never entered into her calculations.

It__ so easy to believe that others deserve their fate, and the fact was that if nobody bothered to help other people then the worst would always happen_ She stares out of her window at the busy street, where the British go about their daily business, taking it for granted that they will never be arrested for not voting the right way, praying the right way, dressing the right way or for belonging to a different tribe.

They might watch American movies, wear American clothes, even read American books but Bush and the Iraq War have made actual American people social lepers; she only has to open her mouth in some places to feel a wave of loathing directed at her. Katie is weary of pointing out that at least half her countrymen detest their President even more than Europe does, but it__ no good.

Familiarity breeds sentiment before contempt.

Family is all politics. Everyone hates each other__ guts, if they__e honest_ Most brothers and sisters try to top each other, given the chance; you always get the worst wars in countries with big families_.People have kids because they go soft in the head, tarts especially. They forget what it__ like to be a kid themselves and want to remember through their own. They don__ want us, not real brand-new people who puke and criticise and tell them to bog off: they want their own frigging innocence back. They want to have their own lives back again, with the bad bits taken out. Quite frankly, they__ be better off with a dog.