People, Wallace suggested in that immensely sad novel, needed to be distracted from the "deeper type of pain that is always there," namely the existential knowledge that "we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we've lost one more day that will never come back".
So I sat, begged for mercy, took tiny bites and tried not to puke.
Until now, pretty much everyone with a story they wanted told was at the mercy of a tiny handful of TV producers and networks.
As her tiny hands shuffle the frayed cardboard squares, Mercy explains how she came to live within the safe house's high-security fences.
In a tiny open boat, you are truly at the mercy of the elements, and your survival is then taken out of your hands into the hands of mother luck.
Rather, I believe that in any good or bad event, God's encompassing and saturating love and mercy are at work, on some tiny and infinite, sub-material, holistic and majestic level that we can barely imagine.
She held him like a porcelain figure, at her mercy, waiting to be dropped to the floor in tiny pieces.
As we sat for the chanting of the Kyrie (Lord, have mercy), the people just to our right started waving tiny Polish flags and red-and-white scarves, trying to get the pope's attention.
At the very end – one small act of compassion was enough to plant the slightest notion of mercy in the young Davros that would leave his Daleks with that tiniest of design flaws.
Tilda suggested I join them on a school trip to the tiny island of Colonsay (population: 120) where, deprived of their mobile phones, the students would be at the mercy of their own initiative.
