Quotes from Rupert Thomson

That's what birthdays were. Days when you found out where you stood. Who was on your side and who wasn't. Nothing to do with how old you were.

She looked the way a rose petal looks when you crush it between finger and thumb.

He looked both proud and guilty of something. As if happiness was a reward and he wasn't sure he'd done enough to deserve it.

The fig tree had dropped its fruit all over the ground. Ripe figs lay in the dust, exploded, bloody, as if the sky had rained organs.

Jed thought he understood. It was like when his radios were thrown away. You could shrug your shoulders, put on a face that said you didn't care, but you did and nothing could ever be secure again. The next time security appeared as a possibility, you smashed it yourself. And went on smashing it. That, he was sure, was how Creed felt.

It seems to me that part of the true function of a mystery is precisely that it remains unsolved. The world would be far too neat a place if the things that puzzled us were always, eventually, explained. We need unanswered questions at the edges of our lives. In fact, I'd go further. It's important not to think we can understand everything. Not to understand. The humility that can come from that. The wonder.

He'd learned something. Life was booby-trapped and there was no easy passage through. You had to jump from colour to colour, from happiness to happiness. And all those possible explosions in between. It could be all over any time.

You have to do normal things or they don't go away. You have to reassure them. Or they just stand there staring at you, as if you're a car-crash, or pornography.

His anger was still there, and he used it to break into her. He liked the way her eyes widened in alarm, as if he was forcing a lock, as if he was breaking and entering. It was the first time he'd ever slept with a woman and it felt like burglary.

Jed was used to isolation. His face was like some kind of cul-de-sac. It said NO THROUGH ROAD to most people. Confronted with him, they always turned around, backed away.

There's love and everybody talks about it, but not all of us come close to it - or, if we do, it's not in the expected way.

The earthquakes in people's heads, half the city's population was cracked, a rabble of doom-merchants, psychos, ghouls. They could smell a funeral a mile off, and out they crawled, out of the woodwork. A funeral lit them up, it was like fuel, it kept them burning for days.

Her smiles were blurred, as if seen from a moving train. Her eyes always creased at the edges by dreams of leaving.

Perhaps there comes a time in your life when you lose the ability to command attention, when the world starts to ignore you because it no longer believes you can have much of an effect on it. With

It was as if Jed had moved from one dimension to another. His original dimension hadn't reported him missing, and his new dimension didn't acknowledge his presence. Maybe what he'd really done was end up somewhere between the two. Some days he almost felt invisible.

You must tell me about it when you do,' she said. 'When you make love for the first time, I mean. I want to know what you think.' He glanced away from her, out of the window. An ice-cream parlour, a man with a dog, a tree. How was he going to get out of shopping next week? 'It's so wonderful, it's like,' and she left her mouth open while she thought, and then it came to her, and she smiled, 'it's like colours everywhere.

He was dropped under a streetlamp, the only person left on the bus. A patch of mauled light. Gritty pavement, scarred with a million cigarette burns. Weeds and spit and oil. Place like this, the only glitter was the knife just before it sank in. Place like this, there wasn't any gold.

This would have once been a place for contemplation. He looked up at the towers surrounding him. Many of the dead bodies had been removed. Their places had been taken by the living.

It was six hours to Hosannah Beach and he didn't glance at the silver coin that Dad had given him, not even once. All the way he clutched it tight in the palm of his hand and fel the bevelled edge bite into his skin. [...] Waiting in the car while Yvonne unlocked the house, he brought his hand up to his face and opened it. His sweat had the bitter smell of hot metal, hot and bitter, this was what leaving home would always smell like.

He thought of his old tapes, the ones he'd had for years, the ones he'd used over and over again. Their silence was always different to the silence of a new tape: it was loaded, prickly with things recorded and erased; a silence that was like ghosts. That house was an old tape masquerading as a new one. It had recorded and erased, but it was pretending it had just come out of the cellophane. It had ghosts, but it wasn't owning up to them.

The sun snagged on his crooked skin.

Il Museo delle Lacrime significava molto di più di quanto il suo nome potesse suggerire. Non si trattava solo di file di bottigliette di vetro identiche, malgrado già questo, se ci pensavi bene, diceva molto sull'uguaglianza. Si trattava di persone che tastavano di aggrapparsi alla felicità che avevano conosciuto.

The strong man lit a cigarette. It looked too frail for his hand. They looked like King Kong and Fay Wray, that hand, that cigarette. There was a movie going on right under his nose and he didn't even know. The guy had about one brain cell and he was doing time in it.

He woke early the next morning. It was still cool, but he opened the window and, leaning on the ledge, looked down at the river. A ship slid by. Then another. Years later, in exile, he would watch the railway tracks from his hotel and it would sink a well in him, and he would taste the same calm water.