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The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again QUOTES

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again QUOTES

1 " I would never have to fake my own death, he found himself thinking. I've all but vanished already. Part of him welcomed that. Another part, larger but distributed so thinly across his personality that it seemed invisible, panicked soundlessly on a twenty-four-hour schedule. "

― M. John Harrison , The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

2 " Two men deep in conversation could be seen disappearing along the opposite pavement towards Mortlake, their shadows cast huge and filmily onto the brewery walls by the kind of late-night city light that, while failing to relieve the darkness in any way, seems to pour in from every direction at once. Otherwise Wharf Terrace presented itself with only minute differences from his usual point of view. He had expected more. "

― M. John Harrison , The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

3 " You took your time,’ she complained. He stared at her. ‘You didn’t want me here. You sent me a letter.’ She laughed until she coughed. ‘I never did!’ she said, in the tone of a younger woman who learns only now of some bravura socio-sexual faux pas achieved with the aid of alcohol a week, a month or a year before. It was one of her most effective impersonations. For a moment she seemed full of life. ‘I never did! "

― M. John Harrison , The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

4 " From then on he would make two or three trips a week to similar premises – bookstores, crystal shops, candle parlours, short-let niche operations selling a mix of pop-cultural memorabilia and truther merchandise from two or three generations ago – which had flourished along the abandoned high streets of the post-2007 austerity, run by a network of shabby voters hoping to take advantage of tumbling rents. Their real obsession lay in the idea of commerce as a kind of politics, expression of a fundamental theology. They had bought the rhetoric without having the talent or the backing. The internet was killing them. The speed of things was killing them. They were like old-fashioned commercial travellers, fading away in bars and single rooms, exchanging order books on windy corners as if it was still 1981 – denizens of futures that failed to take, whole worlds that never got past the economic turbulence and out into clear air, men and women in cheap business clothes washed up on rail platforms, weak-eyed with the brief energy of the defeated, exchanging obsolete tradecraft like Thatcherite spies. "

― M. John Harrison , The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

5 " Noisy shuddering little commuter trains, debatable links: Shaw spent half a day joining one cross-country service to another; hard enough work just to arrive mid-afternoon on the brown edge of Wales. The town, with its undecodable medieval topography and commanding position above the River Severn, had done well out of sheep; then out of brewing; and finally out of coal. Now, like most of those old places, post-colonial, post-industrial and – in the sense that its past had now become its present – fully post-historical, it was curating a collection of original burgage plots, timber-framed heritage structures and quaintly squalid street names. It had been pleased with itself for 700 years. "

― M. John Harrison , The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

6 " Go on like this and you’ll never get used to yourself or anything else,’ his mother had warned him more than once. ‘You’ll always be reinventing the wheel.’ Then, as if aside to a third party: ‘And my God, won’t that be as tiring for you as it is for everyone who has to deal with you.’

In revenge for assessments of this kind, Shaw had quickly learned to skip-read his own experience, maintaining through adolescence only the most lateral relationship with its problems. A short attention span had helped: if for a month or two he liked motorcycles, by Christmas it was horses. He didn’t meet girls. He didn’t make friends. With university behind him, he’d found himself able to skirt most events and encounters, problematic or not, by cataloguing them under ‘sketchy and uninterpretable’ even as they occurred. When he actually took in the things that happened to him, the work was done somewhere else, somewhere deep, if he had anywhere like that: his surface focus – indeed his entire personality – always seemed to be taken up somewhere else. "

― M. John Harrison , The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

7 " If all change is sea change, he thought on the train back to Mortlake, then he could describe his own crisis – whatever it had been – as distributed rather than catastrophic. Sea change precludes the single cause, is neither convulsive nor properly conclusive: perhaps, like anyone five fathoms down into their life, he had simply experienced a series of adjustments, of overgrowths and dissolvings – processes so slow they might still be going on, so that the things happening to him now were not so much an aftermath as the expanding edge of the disaster itself, lapping at recently unrecognisable coasts. "

― M. John Harrison , The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

8 " Anyway, this is less a haircut than a personal essay about haircuts. "

― M. John Harrison , The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again