The Wasp Factory

I stopped, felt better, then started again and felt ten times worse.

God wasn't like that. I said the one I believed in was.

I felt rather like one of those ancient dinosaurs so huge that they had a virtually separate brain to control their back legs. I seemed to have a separate brain for each limb, but they’d all broken off diplomatic relations.

‘I’m not answering these questions any more,’ I said to him as I took my plate to the sink. ‘We should have gone metric years ago.’

Our destination is the same in the end, but our journey — part chosen, part determined- is different for us all, and changes even as we live and grow.

At least I did it when I knew I could afford to, not when I knew I'd need all my faculties at their peak to deal with a crisis. The shit. Call himself a man!

Thus resolved, heart lightened now that I had a definite plan — even if it was more a plan of inaction than anything else

I know the size of the planet and just how minuscule is that part of it I know. I've watched too much television and seen too many nature and travel programmes not to appreciate how limited my own knowledge is in terms of first-hand experience of other places; but I don't want to go farther afield, I don't need to travel or see foreign climes or know different people. I know who I am and I know my limitations. I restrict my horizons for my own good reasons; fear — oh, yes, I admit it — and a need for reassurance and safety in a world which just so happened to treat me very cruelly at an age before I had any real chance of affecting it.

Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.

OFTEN I've thought of myself as a state; a country or, at the very least, a city. It used to seem to me that the different ways I felt sometimes about ideas, courses of action and so on were like the differing political moods that countries go through. It has always seemed to me that people vote in a new government not because they actually agree with their politics but just because they want a change. Somehow they think that things will be better under the new lot. Well, people are stupid, but it all seems to have more to do with mood, caprice and atmosphere than carefully thought-out arguments. I can feel the same sort of thing going on in my head. Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn't really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.