Lloyd Jones

I suppose it is possible to be all of these things. To sort of fall out of who you are into another, as well as to journey back to some essential sense of self. We only see what we see.He was whatever he needed to be, what we asked him to be. Perhaps there are lives like that__hey pour into whatever space we have made ready for them to fill.

For six days I didn__ get up except to make a cup of tea, or fry an egg, or lie in the skinny bath gazing at a cracked ceiling. The days punished me with their slowness, piling up the hours on me, spreading their joylessness about the room.A doctor would have said I was suffering from depression. Everything I have read since suggests this was the case. But when you are in the grip of something like that it doesn__ usefully announce itself. No. what happens is you sit in a dark, dark cave, and you wait. If you are lucky there is a pinprick of light, and if you are especially lucky that pinprick will grow larger and larger, until one day the cave appears to slip behind, and just like that you find yourself in daylight and free. This is how it happened for me.

A Prayer was like a tickle.Sooner or later God would have to look down to see what was tickling his bum.

Dreams are nervy things__ll it takes is for one stern word to be spoken in their direction and they shrivel up and die.

As we watched the soldiers and the Rambo disappear I remember feeling preternaturally calm. This is what deep, deep fear does to you. It turns you into a state of unfeeling.

I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I__ found him _ not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates.

Now listen. Faith is like oxygen. It keeps you afloat at all times. Sometimes you need it. Sometimes you don__. but when you do need it you better be practiced at having faith, otherwise it won__ work. That__ why the missionaries built all the churches. Before we got those churches we weren__ practicing enough. That__ what prayers are for__ractice, children. Practice.

Stories have a job to do. They can't just lie around like lazybone dogs. They have to teach you something.

We were young. Everyone was young in those days. That__ the main complaint you hear from people who are getting old. You stop seeing young people. You begin to wonder if there are any left and whether there were only young people when you were young.

I had discovered that the plainest house can crown a fantasy or daydream. An open window can be tolerated. So can an open door. But I discovered the value of four walls and a roof. Something about containment that at the same time offers escape.

Quiet had a roof and it had walls around it, and you could sit inside it. She had never thought of silence as a place.One of the friends, Tom Williams told her,'the place is in your heart, Louise. Everything else is just clutter.

Under these circumstances, silence among such a large group of people is an uncomfortable thing to experience. Guilt spreads around even to those who have nothing to feel guilty about. Many held their breath. Or, as I heard later, many did what me and my mum did and closed their eyes. We closed our eyes in a bid to remove ourselves.

I could have run after him. I could have asked politely for some clarification. But I didn__ I knew what I preferred, and that was__ didn__ want to know. Rather, I wanted to believe.