Quotes from Jon McGregor

How quickly darkness falls.

I once saw a picture in the paper of John Hegley with 'poet' written on his knuckles, and I thought that was pretty cool, so I was quite up front about it.

But there are people too he says, everywhere there are people and I think it is easier to hold hands with people than it is with angels, yes?

It makes me feel primitive, rooted, connected to the dirt of the earth and the light of the stars, a spun thread pulled across the span of generations.

And I say too much of what, he says too much of everything, too much stuff, too many places, too much information, too many people, too much of things for there to be too much of, there is too much to know and I don't know where to begin but I want to try.

We don't always have the words. But we can talk around things.

brief dry kisses, hugs, little more – would be swept aside in a hurried series of remembered moves and gestures.

William Pearson said that really what they were talking about at the end of the day was Martin Fowler constantly parking like a cunt.

Ask that we not allow ourselves to be overcome by a grief which is not ours to indulge but instead be uplifted by faith and enabled to help that suffering family in whatever way we are called to do

in the way her long thin fingers fiddled with a sugar cube, in the way she held his eye when she spoke, in the way he wanted to reach across and tuck a stray wisp of hair back behind her ear.

shouting to each other like drummers in rock bands calling out rhythms, pasting new skin on the veins of the city.

They were both so much older now. Their bodies had crumpled and softened and worn

they were happy, in the ordinary ways which had evaded them for so long.

Your children grow into adults, and they leave, and they make a life of their own. It's the way the world turns, he said.

a persistent unsettledness of wings.

unspoken regrets and recriminations swept out of sight like crumbs from the table, silence blanketing the room, the two of them avoiding each other's eyes.

She could have ... People still wanted to know.

But here, as the dawn sneaks up on the last day of summer, and as a man with tired hands watches a young couple dance in the carpark of his restaurant, there are only these: sparkling eyes, smudged lipstick, fading starlight, the crunching of feet on gravel, laughter and a slow walk home.

Sung sirens, sliding through the streets, streaking blue light from distress to distress, the slow wail weaving urgency through the darkest of the dark hours, a lament lifted high, held above the rooftops and fading away, lifted high, flashing past, fading away.

If you listen, you can hear it. The city, it sings.

And she doesn't understand why he doesn't want to put out his medal like a trophy. And he can't tell her that he liberated Europe with a spade.

Standing close to each other, intimately close, blind to anyone else, their world reduced for the moment to this self-enclosed space of anger and resentment and shame.

Lives were changed and moved by much smaller cues, chance meetings, overheard conversations, the trips and stumbles which constantly alter and readjust the course of things, history made by a million fractional moments too numerous to calibrate or observe or record.

He imagines what would happen if the whole street called his name, joining with the mother's small voice, the whole street lifting the words and the words spreading through this city, taking flight like a flock of birds at dusk, clouding the sky,... the name, pouring down from the sky... across all our misconnected world, a chorus of name-saying, a brief redemptive span of attention.