19 Quotes by Rupert Thomson

He'd learned something. Life was booby-trapped and there was no easy passage through. You had to jump from colour to colour, from happiness to happiness. And all those possible explosions in between. It could be all over any time.

His anger was still there, and he used it to break into her. He liked the way her eyes widened in alarm, as if he was forcing a lock, as if he was breaking and entering. It was the first time he'd ever slept with a woman and it felt like burglary.

The strong man lit a cigarette. It looked too frail for his hand. They looked like King Kong and Fay Wray, that hand, that cigarette. There was a movie going on right under his nose and he didn't even know. The guy had about one brain cell and he was doing time in it.

The fig tree had dropped its fruit all over the ground. Ripe figs lay in the dust, exploded, bloody, as if the sky had rained organs.

This would have once been a place for contemplation. He looked up at the towers surrounding him. Many of the dead bodies had been removed. Their places had been taken by the living.

The earthquakes in people's heads, half the city's population was cracked, a rabble of doom-merchants, psychos, ghouls. They could smell a funeral a mile off, and out they crawled, out of the woodwork. A funeral lit them up, it was like fuel, it kept them burning for days.

He looked both proud and guilty of something. As if happiness was a reward and he wasn't sure he'd done enough to deserve it.

It was as if Jed had moved from one dimension to another. His original dimension hadn't reported him missing, and his new dimension didn't acknowledge his presence. Maybe what he'd really done was end up somewhere between the two. Some days he almost felt invisible.

Jed thought he understood. It was like when his radios were thrown away. You could shrug your shoulders, put on a face that said you didn't care, but you did and nothing could ever be secure again. The next time security appeared as a possibility, you smashed it yourself. And went on smashing it. That, he was sure, was how Creed felt.