They had been married six years, a time of slow, fine adjustments to the jostling principles of physical pleasure, domestic duty, and the necessity of solitude. Neglect of one led to diminishment or chaos in the others.
It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.
Briony was her last, and nothing between now and the grave would be as elementally important or pleasurable as the care of a child.
How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He.
If I can’t get along with the father of my children, how can the world make progress?
Turning points are the inventions of storytellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character’s growth.
Now here at last were the beginnings of desire, precise and alien, but clearly her own; and beyond, as though suspended above and behind her, just out of sight, was relief that she was just like everyone else... It was undeniable: she was not a separate subspecies of the human race. In triumph, she belonged among the generality.
I’ll wait for you. Come back.” She meant it. Time would show she really meant it.
In her uncomfortable position, his mother cocked her head on one side as she prepared to listen. It was a habit Stephen himself had adopted. He could see their faces, the lined expressions of tenderness and anxiety. It was the aging, the essential selves enduring while the bodies withered away. He felt the urgency of contracting time, of unfinished business. There were conversations he had not yet had with them and for which he had always thought there would be time.
It is difficult to step outside the moment on any given day and ask the unnecessary, essential question, or to realize that however familiar, parents are also strangers to their children.
Only the backward look, the well-researched history could tell peaks and troughs from portals.
All day long, she realized, she had been feeling strange, and seeing strangely, as though everything was already long in the past, made more vivid by posthumous ironies she could not quite grasp.
But Clive stared at the empty seat opposite, lost to the self-punishing convolutions of his fervent social accounting, unknowingly bending and coloring the past through the prism of his unhappiness. Other thoughts diverted him occasionally, and for periods he read, but this was the theme of his northward journey, the long and studied redefinition of a friendship.
The possibility that Julie and I were responsible for the disintegration filled me with horror and delight.
But Baxter heard what Henry never has, and probably never will, despite all Daisy’s attempts to educate him. Some nineteenth-century poet – Henry has yet to find out whether this Arnold is famous or obscure – touched off in Baxter a yearning he could barely begin to define. That hunger is his claim on life.
For one can assume too much sometimes, in fits of conceited self-blame.
Stephen thought that if he could do everything with the intensity and abandonment with which he had once helped Kate build her castle, he would be a happy man of extraordinary powers.
But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past – how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory. Paradise or.
The organ played a familiar introduction. Ever since his truculent fourth form at Berners Hall, he could not bring himself to sing a hymn. However sweet the melodies or the rhythm of the lines he could not get past the embarrassment of their blatant or childish untruths. But the point was not to believe but to join in, to be part of the community.
One great inconvenience of death, according to Roland, lay in being removed from the story. Having followed it this far he needed to know how things would turn out.