Colin McCullough

Lesson number one. There’s no aspect of love which won’t bear the light.

Light and empty as the air so alluringly full of marine tang and sun-soaked vegetation, he drifted for a while on the wings of a different kind of freedom: the relief of relinquishing his mandate to fight her, the peace of losing a long, incredibly bloody war and finding the surrender far sweeter than the battles.

She came on, stepped over the white fence, came so close all he could see were her eyes, those grey, light-filled eyes which hadn’t lost their beauty or their hold over his heart.

Perhaps no human being is equipped to judge which is worse; inchoate longing with its attendant restlessness and irritability, or specific desire with its willful drive to achieve the desire.

Shamed and embarrassed, the bright bird brought home with the sky unplumbed, wings clipped, song drowned into silence.

It never occurred to that subtle, devious mind that an outward display of frankness might be more mendacious than any evasion.

“What could be nicer than falling in love?”
“Almost anything, I think."

It didn’t matter what anyone else thought, it didn’t, it didn’t!

I expected that! Funny how the men in my life all scuttle off into the woodwork, isn’t it?

But words of love mean nothing. I could have screamed them at you a thousand times a day without affecting your doubts in the slightest.
So I haven’t spoken my love, I’ve lived it.

Before, his loneliness had been an impersonal thing, he had never been able to say to himself that the presence in his life of any one being could remedy it. But now loneliness had a name: Meggie. Meggie, Meggie, Meggie…

Why is it that every time I think I’ve got my life under control, something happens?

Old age is the bitterest vengeance our vengeful God inflicts upon us. Why doesn’t He age our minds as well?

“No, Mum,” she said, the tears rolling down her skin, hot like molten metal. Who on earth ever said people most moved don’t weep? They don’t know anything about it.

Meggie is the mirror in which I’m forced to view my mortality.

Justine might be my child, but she’s a prize bitch.