“The partridges struggle frantically. They flap their wings and send feathers flying. They simple refuse to die. He’d find it easier to strangle a friend. He wedges them between his knees to hold them still. Red and white by turns, bathed in sweat, head hight to avoid seeing, he squeezes harder.”
“There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.”
“Thinking of them reminds me of a quote I read recently from the great Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. that says, “If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl.” We must encourage those still struggling to keep moving forward.”
“So begins Mall Percival’s account of how her village of Eyam struggled against the plague. George Vicars dies on September 6, 1665, and by the end of October, twenty-five more townsfolk have been buried. ”
“They drove under stars on a winding route that crossed and re-crossed the river. Farm hamlets lay black in sleep; copses of pine shaped the skyline. And always, against the drone of the van’s engine as it laboured through the gears, came the roar of the Maipo, amplified by the walls of the canyon.”