We had reached tipping point. It was no longer possible to call it a demolition site. Tomorrow, today perhaps, the workers would return and it would become a construction site. The past demolished, it was time for them to start building the future.
There were some for whom the world was such a tricky thing that they marvelled at it without feeling any need to puzzle it out.
He knows what reading is. How it takes you.
I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book.
Then something rang a bell in his mind. What.
She made her resolution. In for a penny, in for a pound.
The steps were flanked by a pair of low pedestals, on which were mounted two giant cats carved out of some dark, polished material. The undulations of their anatomy were so persuasively carved that, running my fingers over one, I half expected fur, was startled by the cool hardness of the stone.
The key that sits in the lock, unused since the days of Hester, is hot. It burns my palm as I turn it.
He has described in precise, measured words the beautiful desolation he feels at the close of novels where the message is that there is no end to human suffering, only endurance. He has spoken of endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements. He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that I prefer.
Not even a ghost could survive here.
Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth; it will be a story.
Aurelius Alphonse Love.
Emmeline and Adeline. Unmistakable. Two manes of red hair, two pairs of black shoes; one child in the navy poplin that the Missus had put Emmeline in that morning, the other in green.
All the grief I had kept at bay for years by means of books and bookcases approached me now.
There was no rational explanation for what she had seen. It was unscientific. And Hester knew the world was totally and profoundly scientific. There could be only one explanation. “I must be mad,” she whispered. Her pupils dilated and her nostrils quivered. “I have seen a ghost!
So tell me about yourself. What are your favourite books? What do you dream about? Whom do you love?
Margaret Lea.” “The biographer.
We’ve been expecting you.
Usually the walk home from the Swan was a time for regret – regret that his joints ached so badly, that he had drunk too much, that the best of life had passed him by and he had only aches and pains ahead of him now, a gradual decline till at the end he would sink into the grave.
To make it true? Was it for me or for her that he made these thankless efforts to connect us? It was an impossible task.