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Rupert Thomson Biography

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“She was someone who heard each grain in the hour-glass, she felt the passing seconds like sandpaper against her softest skin. Time actually seemed to hurt her, and people helped her get through it. [..] Sometimes it seemed to Nathan that her life was just that, a feat of held breath, just another ten seconds, just another five, and then death would flood her lungs like water, a string of glass bubbles to the surface and then nothing. She was scared in a way that he could understand. The kind of fear that sends you running across a six-lane highway or jumping into rapids. She was someone who ran towards her fear, screaming. Who tried to frighten it. Who, in another period of history, would have been worshipped as a saint or burned as a witch.”

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Book:The Five Gates of Hell
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“You must tell me about it when you do,' she said. 'When you make love for the first time, I mean. I want to know what you think.' He glanced away from her, out of the window. An ice-cream parlour, a man with a dog, a tree. How was he going to get out of shopping next week? 'It's so wonderful, it's like,' and she left her mouth open while she thought, and then it came to her, and she smiled, 'it's like colours everywhere.”

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Book:The Five Gates of Hell
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“Vasco bought a bottle of vodka to celebrate and they drank it in the old sailors' graveyard in Mangrove South. This was where the funeral business had first put down its roots. Over the wall, between two warehouses, Jed could just make out the Witch's Fingers, four long talons of sand that lay in the mouth of the river. Rumour had it that, on stormy nights a century ago, they used to reach out, gouge holes in passing ships, and drag them down. Hundreds of wrecks lay buried in that glistening silt. The city's black heart had beaten strongly even then. There was one funeral director, supposedly, who used to put lamps out on the Fingers and lure ships to their doom.”

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Book:The Five Gates of Hell
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“While still practising law, he'd run a hearse-rental agency. Then, later, he'd bought into a handkerchief factory in Baker Park. Their most famous innovation was the funeral hankerchief, a plain white cotton handkerchief with a black border. Not long afterwards he patented the first black-edged tissue. He'd made millions, apparently, though nobody knew what he'd done with the money. His only extravagance had been to install an elevator in the house, so he could move between floors without getting out of his wheelchair. 'So what did he mean about hearing money?' Jed asked. 'It's his factory across the river. He claims he can hear the money being made.”

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Book:The Five Gates of Hell
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“Le gustaba aprovechar el hecho de que nuestros senti-mientos mutuos quedaban fuera del alcance de la imagi-nación de la mayoría de la gente. Esto es Nantes, dijo en una ocasión. Una relación sexual entre dos mujeres es impensable. Se rió entre dientes. Sería irónico, prosiguió, y ciertamente era paradójico, pero se tenía la sensación de que, de hecho, estábamos protegidas por la convención. Estábamos más seguras de lo que pensábamos. Yo no estaba tan convencida.”

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Book:Never Anyone But You
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“Vasco lived in Mangrove Heights, on a bluff overlooking the river. The first time Jed saw the house, he couldn't help thinking of the Empire of Junk. Towers jostled with gables, beams with columns. Gargoyles leered from the eaves, tongues sharp as the heads of arrows, eyes like shelled eggs. The front garden had been planted with all kinds of trees, so the house seemed to skulk. The path to the front door crackled with dead leaves. He could smell plaster, the inside of birds' nests, river sewage. 'I should have been born in a place like this,' Jed said, but Vasco was opening the door and didn't hear.”

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Book:The Five Gates of Hell
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