61
" For six days I didn’t 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’t 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. "
― Lloyd Jones , Mister Pip
66
" We’re always all alone,” he said, his voice cracked and worn.
Tamsin shook her head. She knew that wasn’t true. She had years of proof to the contrary. “No,” she said. “Not always. Not
even often.”
“Oh,” the old man said, with a sigh that seemed to come from the depths of his being. “I forget you’re still young yet.” He
coughed then, a dry, rattling sound. “Sometimes we get a little bit of a facade. We think we have people. Family, friends . . . but
in the end, it’s just you and the darkness. Everyone leaves eventually, my young friend. It’s better, really, to learn it early. This
way, you can save yourself some disappointment.” He sighed then and slumped back against the wall once more. “Because
believing you’re not alone is the cruelest trick of all. "
― Morgan Matson , The Unexpected Everything
78
" A CITY IS AS much a state of mind as a place—a set of perceptions of place. On the last train home to Mullaghbrack or Gortyfarnham or half a hundred other BallyBogMans, two farmers fall to reviewing their experiences of the big city. One has walked the streets and avenues and come away with memories of glistening steeples and dreaming spires, monuments to men of bearing and import, Palladian porticos and grand civic cupolas, pillars, piers, and palisades, and the air full of singing birds. The other has walked the same streets, yet his memories are of grey brick tenements shouldering against each other like nervous thugs; cracked fanlights, windows boarded over with card, baby carriages full of coal or potatoes, tramps in doorways, cabbage leaves underfoot, the perfume of urine and porter, pressing people with voices like flatirons. They might have visited cities continents apart, but it is the same city. "
― Ian McDonald , King of Morning, Queen of Day
