Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Prime Passage: The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

(From a journal entry by the young Billy Prior, just before going into a hopeless battle in 1918 France ... )

"I realize there's another group of words that still mean something. Little words that trip through sentences unregarded: us, them, we, they, here, there. These are the words of power, and long after we're gone, they'll lie about in the language, like the unexploded grenades in these fields, and any one of them'll take your hand off."