“He’s a handsome potato of a man but how much carbohydrate does a woman want?” Louise Doughty ‘A Bird in Winter’

“Imagine if every word we spoke became palpable and dropped from our lips,” the artist Joseph Grigely suggests. “Think about what would happen and the places we would find the residue of our words. Imagine scraps of language lying on countertops. Drawers full of sentences. Peelings of words in the sink. Imagine the dashboards of our cars covered with everyday conversation.”

faint hearts / controlled explosions

It is like trying to lip read in a crowded room

A fleeting moment in a floating world

She whistled all her breath away

Statistics can be like the drunk, where the lamp-post is used for support rather than illumination.

He has a good voice but no ear, a good eye but no taste. It makes little sense.

‘It is the hour of the pearl, the interval between day and night when time stops and examined itself’

‘The echoes made it sound as though she was crying under water.’ John Steinbeck Cannery Row

Shortly before Easter, Glyn Potts began to suspect that the children had not been eating. FT magazine