It’s what my mother would say. She thinks a weightless story is better than one that’s too heavy.” “So. My story is a heavy one.
I know,′ he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.
I needed a lost language. One in which I could communicate with the lost.
And is it better to know?” he asked me. “I can’t tell you. But once you know, it’s impossible to go back.
The incendiary magic she possessed was so strong she could set fire to water if she wanted to badly enough.
Her knowledge of her own mind was what he admired about her. To expect her to bend to his wishes would be to expect her to be other than herself.
There are stories that may be told aloud, and stories that must be told in whispers, and there are stories that are never told at all. The story of the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong was one of these latter ones, known only to the two parties to whom it belonged and the river. But as secret visitors to this world, as border crossers between one world and another, there is nothing to prevent us sitting by the river and opening our ears; then we will know it too.
Rigid, glaring, set in a frown, his face was so much what it had been in life that the maid spoke to him three times before she realized he was dead.
William Henry Cadwalladr.
The storyteller gave me a sideways look. “Miss Lea, it doesn’t do to get attached to these secondary characters. It’s not their story. They come and go, and when they’re gone, they’re gone for good. That is all there is to it.
Mr. Lomax had signed for Emmeline. That told me that she had survived the fire, at least. And on the second line, the name I had been hoping for. Vida Winter. And after it, in brackets, the words, formerly known as Adeline March. Proof. Vida Winter was Adeline March. She was telling the truth.
In summer he was a different person, sprightly and alert, and people took him for a man a decade younger than his years; but in winter he sank as the skies darkened, and by December he was always tired. When he went to bed, he drowned in sleep; when he was wakened from it, dragged from the depths, he was somehow always unrefreshed.
What unnerved me more than all the rest were her sunglasses. I could not see her eyes but, as I remembered the inhuman green irises from the poster, her dark lenses seemed to develop the force of a searchlight; I had the impression that from behind them she was looking through my skin and into my very soul. I drew a veil over myself, masked myself in neutrality, hid behind my appearance.
Even the furniture made the most of the lack of supervision to move about.
We turned into the rose garden where the pruned bushes appeared as piles of dead twigs, but the elaborate borders of box that surrounded them in sinuous Elizabethan patterns twisted in and out of the moonlight, showing here silver, there black. A dozen times I would have lingered – a single ivy leaf turned at an angle to catch the moonlight perfectly; a sudden view of the great oak tree, etched with inhuman clarity against the pale sky – but I could not stop.
Perhaps it didn’t matter, I told myself. Who was there to miss me? No one would suffer from my going. That was a blessing.
Water, like God, moves in mysterious ways. Once inside a house, it obeys the force of gravity indirectly. Inside walls and under floors it finds secret gullies and runways; it seeps and trickles in unexpected directions; surfaces in the most unlikely places.
I’m a storyteller.” “I am a biographer.
In short, Emmeline adapted to her twin’s absence. She learned how to exist apart. Yet still they reconnected and were twins again. Though Emmeline was not the same twin as before, and this was something Adeline did not immediately know.
Don’t you think one can tell the truth much better with a story?