All the women I knew carried some kind of blade, though they were not all metal, or even visible. Whether something had happened to them, or whether they had only anticipated it, it kept them awake the occasional night.
Same old notes, Blanche thinks at one point, but arranged into unfamiliar music.
The whole point of travel is to learn there’s no such thing as normal.
I pray for John the Baptist and Baby Jesus to come around for a playdate with Dora and Boots.
Las personas se mueven tanto por el mundo que constantemente se pierden cosas.
She wants to slap everyone today, to pick up the whole sweat-slick City and punch its lights out.
So much of motherhood is acting.
The girl remembered London as a place of infinite freedom. Now it seemed she’d rented out her whole life to the Joneses in advance. Service had reduced her to a child, put her under orders to get up and lie down at someone else’s whim; her days were spent obeying someone else’s rules, working for someone else’s profit. Nothing was Mary’s anymore. Not even her time was hers to waste.
It depends on the monster, if it’s a real one or not and if it’s where I am.
Under the thousand crystal candelabras I danced with ten elderly gentlemen who had nothing to say but did not let that stop them. I answered only, Indeed and Oh yes and Do you think so?
The Times had announced that seven thousand pounds had been raised to send a party of Englishwomen to the Crimea as nurses. That, Lib had thought, with dread but also a sense of daring, I believe I could do that. She’d lost so much already, she was reckless. All.
Everywhere I’m looking at kids, adults mostly don’t seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don’t want to actually play with them, they’d rather drink coffee talking to other adults.
Houses are like lots of Rooms stuck together, TV persons stay in them mostly but sometimes they go in their outsides and weather happens to them.
The watch has altered the situation that’s being watched.
In fact the English nurses had spent much of their time stuffing mattresses, stirring gruel, and standing at washtubs, but Lib didn’t want the nun to mistake her for an ignorant menial. That was what nobody understood: saving lives often came down to getting a latrine pipe unplugged.
Better to drown in the surf than stand idly by the shore.
All I think when I look at you is hallelujah.
The lightest touch might keep Mary there, rooted in this frozen alley. Instead, she stretched out her hand to the worn red ribbon in Doll’s wig. Was it the same one, she wondered, the first one, the ribbon the child Mary had set her eyes and heart on at the Seven Dials, three long years ago?
Remember,” she says on the way to the white car, “we don’t hug strangers. Even nice ones.” “Why not?” “We just don’t, we save our hugs for people we love.” “I love that boy Walker.” “Jack, you never saw him before in your life.
Work will be your mother, she whispered; it will lead you through dark days; it will clear you a level place to rest at last.