My plans for today are to hang about hoping for a glimpse of her, to have my heart eaten away by the thought of her; to feel my blood bounding maddeningly, ridiculously, like a young boy’s; to despair; to realise the weight of my misery and hunger with each step I take.
People are different in different places,′ he thought hazily. ‘And if they’re all right in one place, it’s best to leave them there.
People are sorry for brides who lose their husbands early, from some accident, or war. And they should be sorry, Mrs Palfrey thought. But the other thing is worse.
The disaster of being old was in not feeling safe to venture anywhere, of seeing freedom put out of reach.
But so little does the rest of the world seem to care if we act nobly or otherwise that no help came to her.
There’s no summing-up, but a sense of incompleteness. After years of building up each unique personality, in the end there is no moment of putting lines beneath the sum and adding up to see what it all amounts too.
Success is always less awkward. It does not make claims upon pity or tact: congratulations are easier to give than condolences.
Past and future to him were the realities; the present dull, meaningless, only significant if, as now, going back along the sands, he could say to himself: ‘Later on, I shall remember.
She felt locked away in herself, but ignorant of her identity, and often she awoke suddenly in the night, without any idea of who she was; thinking, firstly, that she had died.
She could not go on a bus without having an adventure, usually brought about by not minding her own business, and there was always some curious incident to relate to Vinny when he returned home in the evening.
She suddenly felt that she did not know her own son – a sensation common enough to most mothers, but new to her.
Kate seemed to him today to be wounded and on the defensive, a mood that came and went, he knew, with women in their forties.
Kate refused to go to bed – for if she slept, she would have to wake up, she said, and that she could not bear to do-to face afresh the grief she was as yet so little used to.
We should leave our love-making till the dead of night,’ she thought. ‘And bury it secretly in sleep.
As a person much confided in, she had learnt how to let her mind wander a little on a tether, and now she looked out of the taxi at the sun flashing high on buildings and thought what a lovely late afternoon it was.
One of them was the usual Irishman who stands by the bar of every pub selling talk for beer, one of the oldest professions.
I don’t see why” said the Wing Commander. “The very best of families have mad daughters. It never diminishes their importance. Rather increases it.
Do you recall a shepherd’s crook, Laurence? And Gladstone-bag? We may be Liberals, but I didn’t know we had a Gladstone-bag.
Would you like a cup of tea?” asked Julia, who had enough breeding to know that at all emergencies – birth, death or defeat – cups of tea must at once be offered.
It is dangerous to think people human, who once have been divine.