Cumulative Quote Story (2023)

 

During 2023 I read 80 books. Following each reading, on both Twitter and Instagram, I would post a picture of each book together with what I felt to be a pertinent quote from the contents. As I was devising my end of year list, it struck me that putting all these quotes together might form a short story, so - entirely without embellishment and wholly in the order in which the books were read - here it is. I think there's some really fluid segues! For those interested - which I imagine to be only a few - the titles of those 80 books (together with a list of favourites) is included in my 2023 summary of reading/watching/listening which I previously posted here.

 

Untitled

 And it was she who took his gun out of his pocket. She put it in his hand. I heard, "Shoot...Shoot while you're kissing me."

And if everyone believed that the boy was their son, of course there was no reason not to take him into their house.

The corridor was dark and smelt of too much disinfectant for concrete.

A photograph could never hold the shape of a sound.

It takes you strange digging up a littl dead kid like that. From so far back and dead for so long and all the time they ever had ben jus that littl.

The story of my life was a novel whose missing chapters included empathy and kindness and tolerance.

Maigret could not move. He lay inert, in a puddle, at the edge of infinite space.

The flower stared at Emily, then swayed from side to side until it seemed to haemorrhage into a cockerel with deep red plumage and a scarlet crest.

To these young men opportunity beckoned constantly, drawing them ever southward towards Los Angeles and, of course, Hollywood, where, eventually, all the adolescents in the world will be congregated.

I sobbed, and heard a loud ringing in my ears. My entire body throbbed; I felt huge, elephantine, as if I had become bulbous with inflamed limbs and grotesque deformities.

For good or evil you are yourselves, poised for a brief and dazzling time between two annihilations.

We live in the void of our metamorphoses.

You remember the urogi, the night runner you saw. The naked woman dancing alone in the blackness, then gone in a sprint. She could be a bad spirit.

It was such a feeble moan, at such a strange pitch, that, although it filled the house, it was hard to pinpoint its source, as if it were uttered by a ventriloquist.

I crouch by the wall until the night smudges into another grey day, half hoping the wolphins won't come. I've never touched even a sliver of wolphin meat, but how will they know that?

“Is that it?" asked Nicholas. “Is that your big plan? We're about to burn for all eternity and you're going for cocktails?”

Ducrau took a step forwards, perhaps to kiss the dead boy, but he did not do so. He seemed frightened. He looked away, at the ceiling, then at a spot by the door.

I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent.

Overhead, as the darkness became complete, the aurora appeared: a long arc of reddish light stretching from east to west, quivering, as if eager to expand.

We're not sorcerers. We can't have started anything.

She reached into the dress and pulled out a leaflet. It was crudely reproduced, like most of the human population.

I might be indiscreet, but I'll try not to offend. I may occasionally go into slightly bewildering detail, but I'll try not to be boring.

Just then a shot rang out, the room was filled with the smell of burnt gunpowder and a bluish cloud hung in the sunlight.

We walk into any room, and as expected, we catch Patty trying to bring the doll back to life.

Home was suddenly bright in his mind. Annika, Eva, he wanted to get back to them more than anything else.

Home was suddenly bright in his mind. Annika, Eva, he wanted to get back to them more than anything else.

What makes something art is the intention behind it.

I had no idea that I'd come to miss the decay and the danger.

He heard the whisper of a kiss close to him. He had a taste like someone else's saliva in his mouth.

I saw her in front of me and it was like I was speeding along a motorway with a car crash happening way up ahead, but instead of slowing down I was accelerating into it.

Manchester already had enough history for me, enough secret stuff buried away. Hidden rooms at the backs of houses. Moments sinking in the quicksand of time.

Trees are like recording devices, you just need to learn how to read them properly.

When watching foreign films, I was convinced that the words the actors were saying didn't match the subtitles, and that the characters had a direct message to me I couldn't understand.

I'd wager that the only reason he married you and spent so many years with a horror like you, with all due respect, is because you had a hold on him.

So here I am, a ghost in a world of zombies.

I do not know how dangerous the dust is now or in what quantities it is drifting over the hotel.

It's night work that lets something creep in.

Unless you have been inside a sanatorium you do not know that madmen are made there, just as criminals are made in our reformatories.

What do you think the crime rate is in your neighbourhood?

She wants me to think she gets pleasure from degrading herself.

It was an extraordinary moment, and Maigret would never forget the taste of it

I may be wrong, but I think in truth, we never really directly see, rather we imagine a fraction of a second later, what extends before our eyes.

The snouts were as long as human arms and seemed to have shapes at their ends serving as mouths.

Always dead-eyed and looking right through the observer, they resembled a team of assassins, each of whom specialised in a different means of killing.

Her hand, heavy with fake diamond rings, kept landing on the knee of the inspector, who looked glaucous-eyed at this frothing creature.

No operation could ever improve a woman's intellectual skills.

The world stilled, and then changed around her.

Dreams that apparently only last a few seconds can leave their mark on us for a long time, sometimes our whole lives.

No one had broken in. Someone had written in my diary.

Rock 'n' roll is bigger than just records, it's a way of life - you don't even need music to have rock 'n' roll.

I have become the swing of the fire iron.

I got a theory a person ought to do everything it's possible to do before he dies, and maybe die trying to do something that's really impossible.

Burn. Burn. Burn.

…he did seem to have the knack of framing what was essential...

It's hard to understand other people, to know what's hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all.

Surely a man could be forgiven almost anything if he could do this and get it right.

But it has begun and there is no stopping the process, which scans, unloads, associates and empties out in a welter of fact, heresay, and invented memory.

In paradise there are no desires, no pity, no love.

I'm milking the Zanzibar cows.

It was strange and barely understandable, but right here in the midst of love and hate, right at the fracture, the balancing point, this was his place in the world.

She has rediscovered her sharp voice and that disdainful look.

We are so often wrong about those we love, slowly debasing ourselves,, so gradually we barely notice we're doing it

Just then he looked at her and wondered, without knowing why, whether she really wanted him to have found out something.

Yes, the centre of everything is empty. That's how it must be.

He now wished he had started destroying people much earlier in his life.

Always the same song and dance to begin with, the same nervousness, the clenched fists, the darting sidelong glances...

Ginger Rogers said that she did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in heels, but I wouldn't go that far.

Often he thought of death, of himself gone and the great dark shoulder of the world for ever turning away from the nothingness of him forever in the blackness.

There was the sound of a door being slammed and the screeching of tires.

In this box-shaped windowless room, all the girls are named Natasha.

What a lonely place.

Her first night had not been a good one. Too many bad dreams, some of them true.

From the harbourside follow the promontory that stretches out to sea.

I would rather not go into details, but I noticed that there was something violently sexual about her feelings for me.

She had a much delayed wee: a nice yellow flow, then green, then flecks of orange. Lovely.

It was an obvious step to go from the man commuting to his office to the man remaining in his own environment and conducting his business through the use of advanced electronics.

Temperatures soared in the city and melted pear blossoms coated with frost.

Oh my God, Dahmer...what have you done?

Hell is a man's shadow printed on the side of a building.

Civilised men fear wild creatures, especially wild creatures of their own kind who remind them of life in the primeval forests of past ages.