Max Porter Quotes

They offer me a space on the sofa next to them and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me. CROW

I am your Ted's song-legend, Crow of the death-chill, please. The God-eating, trash-licking, word-murdering, carcass-desecrating math-bomb motherfucker, and all that.

I flung the duvet off and flailed and swung and spat at you but you were elsewhere and I had to fall asleep crushed between what you'd said and what I thought.

The sound of her voice was stinging, like a moon-dragged starvation surging into every hopeless raw vacant pore, undoing, exquisite undoing.

We are but pitiful narrative creatures... obsessing over the agony of not knowing. Sisyphus, Atlas, Echo, all those poor souls, now us. It is the oldest story of them all; never-ending pain.

Ghosts do not haunt, they regress. Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of threes or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refugee in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.

But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief. There are very few in health, disaster, famine, atrocity, splendour or normality that interest me (interest ME!) but the motherless children do. Motherless children are pure crow. For a sentimental bird it is ripe, rich and delicious to raid such a nest. DAD

And the boys were behind me, a tide-wall of laughter and yelling, hugging my legs, tripping and grabbing, leaping, spinning, stumbling, roaring, shrieking and the boys shouted I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU and their voice was the life and song of their mother. Unfinished. Beautiful. Everything.

For a souvenir, for a warning, for a lick of night in the morning.

She was beaten to death, I once told some
boys at a party.
Oh shit mate, they said.
I lie about how you died, I whispered to
Mum.
I would do the same, she whispered back.

I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me.

We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.

The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers, which shocks and shocks and is the principal difference between our house and a house where illness has worked away. Ill people, in their last day on Earth, do not leave notes stuck to bottles of red wine saying 'OH NO YOU DON'T COCK-CHEEK'. She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.

She won't ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush, thesaurus).

She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm).

And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.

I will stop finding her hairs.


I will stop hearing her breathing.

Again. I beg everything again.

Once upon a time there were two boys who purposefully misremembered things about their father. It made them feel better if ever they forgot things about their mother.

You don't know your origin tales, your biological truth (accident), your deaths (mosquito bites, mostly), your lives (denial, cheerfully).

Dead Papa Toothwort wakes from his standing nap an acre wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter.

And she laughed, and said she understood, and then off she drifted in that nice way she has. Responsive to the light, I would call it. The type of person who is that little bit more akin to the weather than most people, more obviously made of the same atoms as the earth than most people these days seem to be. Which explains Lanny.

We were smack bang in the middle, years from the finish, taking nothing for granted. I

Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?

...we were different boys, we were brave new boys without a Mum. So when he told us what happened I don't know what my brother was thinking but I was thinking this:
Where are the fire engines? Where is the noise and clamour of an event like this? Where are the strangers going out of their way to help, screaming, flinging bits of emergency glow-in-the-dark equipment at us to try and settle us and save us?
There should be men in helmets speaking a new and dramatic language of crisis. There should be horrible levels of noise, completely foreign and inappropriate for our cosy London flat.