63
" Non-teenagers might find his appeal difficult to understand, as he isn’t especially handsome, or big, or even funny; his features are striking only in their regularity, the overall effect being one of solidity, steadiness, the quiet self-assurance one might associate with, for instance, a long-established and successful bank. But that, in fact, is the whole point. One look at Titch, in his regulation Dubarrys, Ireland jersey and freshly topped-up salon tan, and you can see his whole future stretched out before him: you can tell that he will, when he leaves this place, go on to get a good job (banking/insurance/consultancy), marry a nice girl (probably from the Dublin 18 area), settle down in a decent neighbourhood (see above) and about fifteen years from now produce a Titch Version 2.0 who will think his old man is a bit of a knob sometimes but basically all right. The danger of him ever drastically changing – like some day joining a cult, or having a nervous breakdown, or developing out of nowhere a sudden burning need to express himself and taking up some ruinously expensive and embarrassing-to-all-that-know-him discipline, like modern dance, or interpreting the songs of Joni Mitchell in a voice that, after all these years, is revealed to be disquietingly feminine – is negligible. Titch, in short, is so remarkably unremarkable that he has become a kind of embodiment of his socioeconomic class; a friendship/sexual liaison with Titch has therefore come to be seen as a kind of self-endorsement, a badge of Normality, which at this point in life is a highly prized commodity. "
― Paul Murray , Skippy Dies
70
" A tiny number of very rich people, including fat cat bankers like us, are sucking up a bigger and bigger percentage of the wealth. And that gap will continue to widen, because with all our extra capital we go and buy up all the assets, so that for instance when Chang working down there in Spar needs somewhere to live, he has to rent his house from me, meaning that I'm getting most of his wages too. Now, provided you're me and not Chang, that's good news. But if you are Chang, then not only is your slice of the pie shrinking, but there are also more and more Changs trying to get a bite of it. "
― Paul Murray , The Mark and the Void
72
" By hoarding images, we seek to conquer time. Of course, we do not mistake a photograph in a frame or on a screen for the reality as it was. Nevertheless, as Barthes has written, the photograph makes an assertion, and it makes it in a particular mode - what the Greeks called the Aorist, a form of the past tense that is never actually completed but seems to go on indefinitely. Thus, the picture presents us with the past as a continuum which flows parallel to the present, but flows statically, a frozen river, so we may examine it at any point in the future. It is this imagined future self, looking at the pictures of the past, that is the true product of the camera. Although technology has the capability now to record entire lifetimes, meaning that every moment may be pulled from the foaming sea of oblivion to the dry land of perfect recall, the mythic power of the photograph nevertheless relates to the future, and not to the past. Every recording conceals the secret fantasy of a future self who will observe it; this future self is himself the simulacrum, the persona ficta. He exists beyond time, beyond action, beyond need; his only function is to witness the continuum of the past, as he might observe the steps that brought him to godhood. Through this fantasy, time is transformed from the condition of loss into a commodity that may be acquired and stockpiled; rather than disappear ceaselessly into the past, life accumulates, each moment becoming a unit of a total self that is a culmination of our experiences in a way that we - biological composites who profligately shed our cells, our memories and our possessions - can never be. And this fantasy self or persona ficta is the soul, as conceived by a materialist people; he is the apotheosis of the individual, arrogating reality to himself just as the bank does with its totalizing abstraction. "
― Paul Murray , The Mark and the Void
74
" The first time Halley set eyes on Howard was at a showing of The Towering Inferno. When she heard about him, her sister had wondered aloud how much of a future you could have with someone you’d met at a disaster movie. But at that point Halley wasn’t feeling picky. She had been in Dublin just over three weeks – not so long that she didn’t still get lost all the time on the infuriating streets that kept changing their names, but enough to disabuse her of most of her illusions about the place; enough too, with the deposit and first month’s rent for her new apartment, to separate her from most of the money she’d brought, and cut the time available for soul-searching and self-finding quite drastically. That afternoon she’d spent in an Internet café, reluctantly updating her résumé; she hadn’t had a conversation since the night before, a stilted exchange with the Chinese pizza delivery boy about his native Yunan province. When she spotted the poster for The Towering Inferno, which she and Zephyr must have watched twenty times together, it was like catching sight of an old friend. She went in and for three hours warmed herself in the familiar blaze of collapsing architecture and suffocating hotel guests; she stayed in her seat until the ushers started sweeping round her feet. "
― Paul Murray , Skippy Dies
77
" She never came back after mid-term break; according to the Automator, ‘unforeseen circumstances’ had forced her to extend her holiday. Every day Howard sees her classes trooping despondently from the Geography Room to the study hall, or carrying votive bundles of cardboard and paper to the recycling bins, their faces anxious, hopeful, like Indians doing a rain dance. He knows how they feel. Since mid-term he’s existed in a constant state of tension, braced against every moment as the one that might finally restore her. Even out of school, even on his own, shopping in the supermarket, sitting at the traffic lights, he finds himself holding his breath. But the days are a series of ghost pregnancies, delivering nothing. "
― Paul Murray , Skippy Dies
78
" They pause, almost but not quite clutching each other, with their ears cocked. The hideous dried-out croak is drawing inevitably closer – apparently, whether by some quirk of the architecture, the type of stone in the masonry perhaps or the curious way the corridor bends, from both directions at once. The boys gibber at each other helplessly. With every passing instant now the temperature drops precipitously, the grey light wanes; the ghastly voice chants its message, necrotic and Latin, over and again, as though doomed to repeat it, doomed for eternity, a doom that any second now they will be sharing, when the voice’s owner comes around that corner, or the other corner, or possibly even both corners, to find them quaking before her – "
― Paul Murray , Skippy Dies
80
" A dainty man of a nervous disposition, Father Laughton detests discord above all things. He always climbs down before seriously disagreeing with anyone; he can’t dismiss the most disruptive student from his class without feeling sorry twenty seconds later and racing down the corridor to summon him back. As a result, his music appreciation courses are notoriously anarchic – in fact they make anarchy look like a slow day at the library – and yet, at the same time, they are marked by a kind of goodwill, and the priest always seems happy there, in the midst of the melee, humming along to a Field larghetto or a Chopin mazurka while paper planes, pencil cases, books and larger objects fly through the air around him. "
― Paul Murray , Skippy Dies
