thegreatmanda's Reviews (459)

“Well, I wouldn't say you were a full-on pompous arse. Maybe more of a supercilious butt cheek.” 

Basically, what I needed was a way of trying to get in touch with my dad that left me with as little chance as possible of having to be in touch with my dad.

Alex's club was called Cadwallader's and it was exactly like you'd expect a club called Cadwallader's to be. Lurking discreetly behind a door just off St James's Street, it was made entirely of oak, leather, and men who'd been occupying the same armchair since 1922.

His name tasted bright and sharp on my tongue. Sugar and cinnamon.

“It’s hard for me to understand why anyone wouldn’t want you in their life.”
I snorted. “Have you met me?”
“Please don’t laugh this off. I mean it.”
“I know. It’s just easier to push people away than watch them leave.” The words hung there, and I wished I could suck them back into my mouth.

He smelled of familiarity, of homecoming, and of the night I’d spent wrapped in his arms. And he made me feel so fucking precious I wasn’t sure I could bear it. 

“Well, I can’t really talk about it, but we’ve recently acquired a very promising new author who specialises in high-concept science fiction. And it got a starred review in Publishers Weekly and everything, and there were some wonderful pull quotes and the one we decided to run with especially recommended it to fans of another, more famous author of high-concept science fiction. So we put it on all the posters and there’s big campaign all over the Underground and it’s on the front of the book and it’s too late to change any of it.”
Oliver was looking perplexed in a way that made me want to hug him. “That seems unalloyedly positive, Bridget.”
“It would be.” She threw herself into the nearest free chair. “Except the more famous author in question was Philip K. Dick. And the pull quote was, ‘If you like Dick, you’ll love this.’ And no one spotted it until we started getting extremely disappointed reviews on Amazon.”

“I feel compelled to point out," said Sophie finally, "that you've just refused to take money from me now because I'm drunk. But you've invited me to a party where you presumably try to get a lot of people drunk and then ask them for money."
"Yeah, it's not unethical if you print invitations.”

These weren't yeah whatever kisses. They weren't take it or leave it, get your coat you've pulled kisses. They were everything I thought I could never have, everything I'd been pretending I never wanted, telling me that I was worth it, that he'd be there for me and put up with me, and wouldn't let me drive him away.

“In any case, I wasn’t prepared for the truth of you.”

“I'm conscious this could be rather burdensome to hear, but you remain the thing I have most chosen for myself. The thing that's most exclusively mine. The one thing that brings me the deepest joy.” 

Witty people came out in autumn; beauties in July.

[...] you'll have to forgive me, darling, I am old-fashioned, I believe in General Motors and the clarity of the gods...

Truly Christ blessed the lepers and the whores, but there is no comfort in the Bible for boys with small winks, and they are the most shunned of all.

While his life was impeccable on the surface, he felt he was behind glass; moving through the world in a separate compartment, touching no one else.

[...] when he said one evening, after they had ruined another lasagne, "When we're fifty, we'll probably be good cooks," Malone was deeply touched; for with those words he had said, "I'll love you till I die."

He felt he had been embraced, taken in beneath these warm covers, not by Frankie, but by the world itself, by God, and he lay there, listening to Frankie's heart beat against his ear, afraid to breathe he was so happy; till Frankie kissed him, and he looked up and saw, in the faint light of the streetlight, the tenderness and gratitude that had flooded Frankie's eyes, and made them glisten and sparkle like the rain outside, as he looked down at Malone with the faint smile of a man who awakens in the depths of the night to find not only is he safe, but loved. Frankie merely smiled at him, but for that look, those eyes, Malone would have given the world.

"Why dangerous?" said his tutee.
"Dangerous because you may lose your heart," he said, standing up. "Or mind. Or reputation. Or contact lenses."

They made love much later on a mattress in the living room, as the cries of children playing in the street echoed around them, and when Malone left he had fallen in love; not with the young man, but the thought of him in the bathtub with his candles reading books of anatomy; and when Malone went to see him the next time, he simply sat with him in the bathroom and did not even ask to make love.

Love is, after all, my darlings, all anticipation and imagination, and when they finally met they would say something perfectly mundane!

He wandered the streets and parks with the deep pleasure of someone who is saying good-bye to a place, which, once it has been relegated to the past, now seems especially touching.

But Malone continued standing there, within the house of flesh, the Temple of Priapus, staring out at that sparkling snowfall. That was it. That was Malone - standing in the crush of voluptuous limbs, enthralled by the cold, lonely, deserted street.

Yancy was the only name she used, and whenever a scruffier sort of wizard came to the commune looking for help, more often than not they said she’d sent them, with her respects. Once, I’d asked why, and Mum told me she’d helped her resolve a corruption of perception that had lodged itself too deep into her imagination. If that doesn’t tell you much, just avoid consuming too many alchemical substances in unreal spaces and it won’t happen to you. 

I was seeing whispers and wind chimes — not solid wind chimes dangling, which would have been all right; I was seeing the sound of wind chimes, and don’t ask me to describe it. 

All of magic essentially involves sneaking something you want past reality while it’s distracted and looking the other way.

When he smiled, the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled like a leaf held to flame.

"There is no one like you," I said, at last.
He regarded me a moment, in silence. "So?"
Something in the way he spoke it drained the last of my anger from me. I had minded, once. But who was I now, to begrudge such a thing?
As if he heard me, he smiled, and his face was like the sun.

"I hoped that you would come," he said. My stomach rolled, awash with nerves and relief at once. I drank him in, the bright hair, the soft curve of his lips upwards. My joy was so sharp I did not dare to breathe.

My body felt hollow in its relief, as if a storm had gone through.

His eyes were unwavering, green flecked with gold. A surety rose in me, lodged in my throat. I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.
If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth.

We were like gods at the dawning of the world, and our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.

If he had looked at me then, I would have broken. I would have begun to weep and never stopped.

His eyes, green as spring leaves, met mine. "Patroclus. I have given enough to them. I will not give them this."

He buried his face in his hands and did not speak. I held him and whispered all the bits of broken comfort I could find.

I learned to sleep through the day so that I would not be tired when he returned; he always needed to talk then, to tell me down to the last detail about the faces and the wounds and the movements of men. And I wanted to be able to listen, to digest the bloody images, to paint them flat and unremarkable onto the vase of posterity. To release him from it and make him Achilles again.

Give us both peace. Burn me and bury me. I will wait for you among the shades.

"It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after."

Her mouth tightens. "Have you no more memories?"
I am made of memories.
"Speak, then."

I conjure the boy I knew. Achilles, grinning as the figs blur in his hands. His green eyes laughing into mine. Catch, he says. Achilles, outlined against the sky, hanging from a branch over the river. The thick warmth of his sleepy breath against my ear. If you have to go, I will go with you. My fears forgotten in the golden harbor of his arms.

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.

In the pit, the easiest way to dismiss a female's work was by calling it domestic. Or decorative.

In middle school she'd taken us for frozen yogurt every Friday, teaching us among other things that the rudest thing you can say to someone is usually polite—her favorite was, I'll pray for you.

You need to understand that marriage isn't about being kind. It's a step beyond kindness. It requires constant, active mercy.

"If you needed years to get right with yourself after David, that's okay. If you never really do, that's fine. When somebody loses a leg, we don't judge them for not being able to run anymore. You don't have to get better. You can just be hurt for the rest of your life. Sometimes that's how it goes."

Maybe the worst thing about surveillance was discovering that so many people had no actual secrets worth learning, were in fact exactly what they seemed to be from the outside.

Anything that anybody does to stay alive is self-defense.

The world is one more thing that just happens to people.