You don’t ever do something just because it makes you feel good?” The assistant shrugs. “Mademoiselle, you need to spend more time in Paris.
There’s no such thing as a life free of complications, Rory. We all end up making compromises in the end.
That Mack McGuire, he makes my heart flutter like a clean sheet on a long line.
She’d read somewhere that you only truly saw what someone looked like in the first few minutes of meeting them, that after then it was only an impression, colored by what you thought of them.
Divorced? I’m a good Catholic girl, Louisa. We don’t divorce. We just make our men suffer for all eternity.
Here’s the thing about middle-class people. They pretend not to look, but they do. They’re too polite to actually stare. Instead, they do this weird thing of catching sight of Will in their field of vision and then determinedly not looking at him. Until he’s gone past, at which point their gaze flickers toward him, even while they remain in conversation with someone else. They won’t talk about him, though. Because that would be rude.
So with the loss of my family as well as the man I had loved, every thread that had linked me to who I was had been abruptly cut. I felt as if I had simply floated off, untethered, to some unknown universe.
I had never had to consider what I said; talking to him was as effortless as breathing.
Sometimes it took only a few words of faith to reilluminate a spark of confidence that the future could be something wonderful, instead of a relentless series of obstacles and disappointments.
And when it came down to it, what was the point in reexamining your sadness all the time anyway? It was like picking away at a wound and refusing to let it heal.
Perhaps we all harbor a perverse need to get close to things that might destroy us.
An ordinary girl, leading an ordinary life. It actually suited me fine.
She cried like someone heartbroken.
I always think this is the kind of place that people come back to. When they’ve become tired of everything else. Or when they don’t have enough imagination to go anywhere else.
Nobody listens any more. Everyone knows what they want to hear, but nobody actually listens.
And finally, my head pressed into the pillow, I cried, because my life suddenly seemed so much darker and more complicated than I could ever have imagined, and I wished I could go back...
Louisa, is your life always like this?
I sang in the shower, lay awake dreaming. I wore my old dresses, my brightly colored cardigans and my satin pumps, and let myself be enclosed in a bubble of happiness, conscious that bubbles only ever existed for so long before they popped anyway.
I had liked men, sure, and wanted to sleep with them, but sometimes I wondered if I was missing some sensitivity chip. I couldn’t imagine crying over anyone I’d been with.
If he has love, he will feel he can go on.