Cumulative quote story

During 2022 I read 70 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 70 books (together with a list of favourites) is included in my 2022 summary of reading/watching/listening which I previously posted here.

Untitled

Hadn't a man killed himself because someone had stolen this suitcase? And there was nothing in it but an old suit and some dirty laundry.

Afterwards he was so filled with self-disgust that he drank a bottle of pastis straight. He vomited most of it back up, and was furious to find himself still alive in the morning. And the grey, used corpse at his side.

After the terrible flash he had time for one thought: A bomb has fallen directly on us. Then, for a few seconds or minutes, he went out of his mind.

When he was a kid, he imagined the night creatures might think him dead if he lay still enough, and so they wouldn't bother him. The logic of this now escaped him. A dead body was easy prey.

Because I have shown my hands to be empty you must now expect not only that an illusion will follow, but that you will acquiesce in it.

It was a sight as arresting, as unforgiving as watching the death of an animal with which there is no means of communicating.

It was dull to need a map.

The curse of work so stupid you could weep and so interminably monotonous that it made the days too long and, at the same time, life too short.

She watches her mother spill her secrets onto the grass, her father ransacking her insides.

It's easy enough for strong people to despise cowards. But they ought to take the trouble to learn where the cowardice comes from.

I suppose anything is magical that makes you feel like it's possible to have here and there at the same time.

If you was to ask me to point out the most uncivilised area on the face of this globe I would point here.

We don't want to be killed! We don't want to die! We want to live!

It was as if all that had made her who she was had fled at the moment of dying.

No one is more wary than a deranged man who's still lucid enough to realise that he is disturbed.

I was dreaming of the sea. Except everything was mixed up, as if one ocean had run into another. Sea creatures that should never meet ran alongside each other.

Outside a crowd had gathered, because the rumour had circulated in late afternoon that something was about to happen. But nobody had imagined it would be so lacking in excitement.

Forget souls or emotional vibrations, truth is ghosts are closer to ambered flies trapped in their own past.

There were now only families left on the beach, which exuded all the warmth of a summer evening.  A black ship moved imperceptibly across the line of the horizon, entered the sun and emerged on the other side, as if it had jumped through a paper hoop.

How easily she can fell him: and he will always fall.

They may have pitied me for what I was going through, but they had no idea how it felt to suffer something and not know what it was.

The creatures were still motionless in their alcoves, swaddled in their capes of ragged skin, but their heads were raised and flung back now, those blunt muzzles flared open, the teeth splayed, as they howled their grief.

My knees were rubber and my head was full of gravel and my tongue was just an old bar rag. I got up from the window and swayed a moment, holding the wall. Then I turned slowly.

The four people were trapped on the island as though the subject of an experiment conducted by an unknown hand.

Outside, it seemed that the curious silhouette of the convicted criminal was being literally blown around the terrace of the bar.

She wondered if this was such a place, a non-world hidden in the gaps and folds of her own.

'It's not real, any of it. You're crazy. You need help: none of this is real.  It's just - It's stories, nothing but fairy tales.'

'Stories don't change a thing in the end, no matter how many times you tell them.'

The gun made a small flat sound - almost an unimportant sound.

And then his grandmother died and Underhill realised what it was that the flea expected from him.

The dancer had gone back to sleep, her hair tangled, her face gleaming with perspiration. A deep sleep, into which she seemed to have plunged deliberately.

A rainbow is not the light.

He also insisted that her lips remain tight closed during their bedroom scenes, for which he kept on his shoes - 'in case of fire,' he explained.

Rima Cagnac woke, only to learn that she had come close to dying almost eight decades earlier.

After a few minutes of enthusiastic kissing, he pulled away and said, "Are we going to spend all our time necking, or are we going to shoot something?”

To think that this child, this half-being, this imperfectly formed, helpless creature had the audacity - I can't call it anything else - to love and desire with the conscious, sensuous love of a real woman!

The reflection was not enantiomorphic. My buttonhole was on the right. But so was his.

The floor felt warm, worn, hydroptic, apical, pinnate, like the flesh of a vulpine and voluptuous courtesan erotogenically dying.

As I knelt down to slide the laptop between the wardrobe and the wall, I looked at Jane in her red wig and blue dress and put a finger to my lips - Shhh.

The only way we can explore the future is to reinvent the world.

I had become my own quarry at last, the eternally receding object of my own investigations.

He never removed his hand from the glass, except to refill it. His voice was slurred, faltering, lacking in conviction. He looked at no one in particular. He seemed to be melting into the background.

He was amazed by the sheer beauty of that scene, this tall, slender figure, at times almost obscured amid a confusion of sunlit vapour.

I sat back in my seat, letting out a long breath that I didn't realise I'd been holding.

He remained a tall man with short arms and a hundred accoutrements that nobody else could use.

A society that accepts haphazard interrogation and punishment is a society that has become quiescent, and malleable, and safer.

Normally, his hair was a rook's nest of dark copper whorls; wet and slicked back by the water, it looked like eels dipped in rust.

Well it's probably all right. Good old-fashioned pub grub. But, to be honest, £8.50 a meal? I was hoping to pay more.

The woman entered the fire as if it were a swimming pool; she dove in, ready to sink. There was no doubt she did it of her own will. A superstitious or provoked will, but her own.

Saburo never acted by the proposition that if a person did not love someone he would have to be in love with someone else, or that if he loved someone he could not be in love with someone else.

If there's one thing I became sure of in the course of those weeks, it was this: there is no meaning. That is to say, it didn't exist before we did.

Looking back, gathering together this way - somewhere between a half-normal life and the absence of life - was preparing us for what was to come.

Other people are a mystery and unknowable - and the only way you can survive life is through some kind of selective blindness to that fact.

It was sad. So sad that it almost made you want to give up on being a man, on living on this earth, even though the sun shines on it for several hours a day and there are real birds flying freely.

I know now, of course, that this was a stupid thing to think, in so far as most things we believe will turn out to be ridiculous in the end.

Devo's affinity with outsiders and geeks was a major strength of their appeal that drove the success of Freedom.of Choice at a critical moment.

Since I was a boy, I've dreamed about being a cop and living on the moon. But now I'm here, it seems like the party's over and everybody's going home.

I see he's a cardigan which dreamt it was once a man, or a strawberry flan.

Eyes are the only hands some of us have left.

It's totally normal to feel hopeless or worried every now and then, but if it's ruling your life then it's not so normal.

He paced back and forth, leaving the light for the shadow and then the shadow for the light. He gave the impression of a man containing himself, who can remain calm only at the cost of a terrible effort.

He stood back and gave the door a good kick.

Upstairs, I probed you and you felt like the softest tangerine in the fruit bowl.

Brody felt light-headed. His fingertips tingled. He sat down in the chair and drew several deep breaths, to stifle the fear that was mounting inside him.

He had the charm of certain consumptives: fine features, transparent skin, lips that were sensual and mocking at the same time.

Maybe you're better off not asking questions you don't really want the answer to. Just keep pretending this is a fairy tale and leave the hard decisions to the adults.

It was bold and it was brazen, though neither word did her performance justice; masterful: that just about covered it.

He felt a wave of disquiet. It had been a bad break coming across this girl. In combat, like it or not, a girl is your extra heart. The enemy has two targets against your one.

You think I was chasing you. Perhaps it was you who was chasing me from in front. Perhaps we were simply running in the same direction. We each see things in a way that suits our own preference.

Dr Nathan gazed at the display photographs of terminal syphilitics in the cinema foyer. Already members of the public were leaving.