("The Passion")

[fiefoe]

People compare Jeanette Winterson's prose with that of John Banville's: highly crafted, evocative, but the hidden adjective is 'high-strung'. That means that when one's mental digestive capacity is somehow compromised, sentences like 'She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. <>Like God, she was neglected.' don't sit particulary well.

This is to explain why it was unwise to bring this book onto a plane, despite its slim size. Incidentally, I'm now losing count of the books I didn't finish that takes place in Venice.

• We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched.
• We're white with red noses and blue fingers. <> The tricolour.
• (Bonaparte) comes regularly rattling from the Tuileries and scanning the seas like an ordinary man checks his rain barrel.
  
• St Paul said it is better to marry than to burn...
• I asked him why he was a priest, and he said if you have to work for anybody an absentee boss is best.
• He was in love with himself and France joined in. It ws a romance. Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.
• Without him,... our nights and days were different only in the amount of light they let in.
• Most of these recruits aren't seventeen and they're asked to do in a few weeks what vexes the best philosophers for a lifetime; that is, to gather up their passion for life and make sense of it in the face of death.
• 'I don't care about the facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change, I want to remember that.'
  
• Real dark is thicker and quieter, it fills up the space between your jacket and your heart. ... Stand still in the Dark in a field or down a track. It's then you know you're there on sufferance.
• Soldiers and women. That's how the world is. Any other role is temporary. Any other role is a gesture.
• But of all sorrows, he has our living horses cast by men who stretched their arms between the Devil and God and imprisoned life in a brazen form.
• For lovers, a bridge is a possibility, a metaphor of their chances.
  
• eely water, a great stretch of stars