Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. P...ancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand--my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm's length.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My paternal grandmother would not light a fire on the Sabbath and piled all Sunday's washing-up in a bucket, to be dealt with on M...onday morning, because the Sabbath was a day of rest--a practice that made my paternal grandfather, the village atheist, as mad as fire. Nevertheless, he willed five quid to the minister, just to be on the safe side.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sounds are: the brisk swish of broom on tatami matting, the raucous cawing of hooded crows in a nearby willow grove; clickety-... clackety rattle of chattering housewives, a sound like briskly plied knitting needles, for Japanese is a language full of Ts and Ks; and, in the mornings, the crowing of a cock.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for ma...gic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We used chamber-pots a good deal.... My mother ... loved to repeat: "When did the queen reign over China?" This whimsical and harm...less scatological pun was my first introduction to the wonderful world of verbal transformations, and also a first perception that a joke need not be funny to give pleasure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we ...have never known them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A pragmatic race, the Japanese appear to have decided long ago that the only reason for drinking alcohol is to become intoxicated ...and therefore drink only when they wish to be drunk. So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a fruitful island of the sea-world, a great Ithaca, there parched and stony and here trodden by flocks and curly- headed bul...ls and heavy with thick-set grain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »