“They once thought they were a kind of family because together they had carved companionship out of isolation. But the family they imagined they had become was false. Whatever each one loved, sought or escaped, their futures were separate and anyone’s guess.”
“…It took a while for trust between them. Perhaps because both were alone without family, or because both had to please one man, or because both were hoplessly ignorant of how to run a farm, they became what was for each a companion. A pair, anyway, the result of the mute alliance that comes of sharing tasks.”
“They settled into the long learning of one another: preferences, habits altered, others acquired; disagreement without bile; trust and that wordless conversation that years of companionship rest on…. They leaned on each other root and crown. Needing no one outside their sufficiency. Or so they believed. For there would be children, of course.”
~Toni Morrison, a mercy
“When I said I thought you could hear the whole of history in [ music], all history’s grandnesses and sadnesses, you’d looked a bit annoyed. You’d taken the iPod off my knee and disconnected its headphones from their socket. When I’d removed the dead headphones from my ears you’d rolled them up carefully and tucked them into the special little carrying-case you keep them in. You’d said you were getting a migraine. Impatience had crossed your face so firmly that I had known, in that instant, that now we were actually a kind of married, and that our marriedness was probably making your real relationship more palatable.
Sometimes a marriage needs three hearts beating as one.
I’ve met your partner. She’s nice. I can tell she’s quite a nice person. She knows who I am but she doesn’t know who I am. Her clothes smell overwhelmingly of the same washing powder as yours.”
~Ali Smith, fidelio and bess
“I was in the first flush of a new love, I say. I was having that surge of pure happiness and energy that happens when you’re first in love again. I was whistling the tune of it, walking down a country road whose verges were all grasses and wildflowers…”
“It is early evening. We’re in bed again. It is almost embarrassing, going to bed with someone so many times in the one day.
You’re not the first person I’ve ever gone to bed with so many times in the one day, I say.
I hope not, you say.
You’re not the first person I’ve ever felt new with, I say.
Won’t be the last, you say.”
~Ali Smith, the first person
