Ali Shaw

“Perhaps you think too hard about what words you're going to use and how to make your mouth say them.”

“Beeches stood aghast in pools of shed leaves. Silver poplars looked like moonbeams.”

“Memories were just photos printed on synapses.”

“Light didn't conduct truth as once he'd thought. There was nothing you could do to preserve truth. Light was only of use as a metaphor for the ungraspable moment.”

“Die Jahre, die man auf dem Buckel hatte, waren zu nichts mehr nutze: Man brauchte sie ungelebt, einen ganzen Vorrat davon. Denn je älter man wurde, desto mehr Dinge gingen zu Bruch.”

“Wenn du in's Fettnäpfchen getreten bist und jemand dir freundlicherweise die Hand hinstreckt, um dich da rauszuholen, dann solltest du die Hilfe vielleicht annehmen, anstatt dich auch noch darin zu wälzen.”

“I should take a photo.''No. Just remember it, and us in it.”

“It was just her and Midas in here, tucked away from the world. Here she could turn quietly into glass, with only love to distract her.”

“Carefully, he reached around her with both arms so his fingers locked across her back.'You have to squeeze,' she whispered, 'or it's not a hug.”

“He imagined dying and being cut open and there were all his bones and muscles and his bared arteries and capillaries leading to a cavity in his chest where instead of a heart he had his camera.”

“Dust particles panicked and swarmed in the light.”

“Sometimes I just can't stop thinking enough to turn off.”

“The sunset like a blacksmith, was beating the sky into glowing red blades.”

“Her toes were pure glass. Smooth, clear, shining glass. Glinting crescents of light edged each toenail and each crease between the joints of each digit. Seen through her toes, the silver spots on the bed sheet diffused into metallic vapours.”

“She had felt a collision with him and known that she had wanted this her whole life: to crash for just one moment into another person at such a velocity as to fuse with him.”

“Then there were the negatives. How he missed negatives. They were the actual rays of light, bounced straight off a landscape, an object, a person, and scarred on to the film. Photographic negatives were the hardest evidence you could get of your memories. They were the char left by the fire, the bruise left on your skin. The same light that carried to your eyes, on the day of your photograph, that image of your mother, or your father, or your close friend, had recorded itself on the film. And now, staring at the photo on the wall of Ida's transparent toes against the bed sheets, he thought how similar her feet were to negatives: both subjects of that half-world between memory and the present. These were not real, flexible, treading toes, but a play of light that showed where toes had been.”

“One day, I learned that a single look can change everything. And since then I have seen it countless times. I have grappled to understand it and failed. For instance, all it took was a look from another man for my wife to fall out of love with me. It baffles me that a simple alignment of eyes can cause so much devastation.”

“Have you ever hoped for something? And held out for it against all the odds? Until everything you did was ridiculous? ”

“It didn’t take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory.”

“Sometimes Midas suspected that life was a film with subliminal messages. Things would move along with an acceptable degree of predictability, then be punctuated by some horrible childhood memory.”

“His father looked wistful. 'And you don't feel anticlimatic?'What's that?'Somewhat the opposite of elated.'What's elated again?'Good feelings. That is to say, very good. You can feel, can't you? That's what I'm driving at. You don't ever wonder... where feeling went?”

“After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind.”

“Writing is like going underwater - thank you for being there when I come back up.”