Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Miss Armstrong. But why would you not when the reality was so awful? And that was that. Juliet’s war.
You don’t see the point of English literature?’ ‘I don’t see the point of studying it. Surely one just reads it?
And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!
No woman was ever truly safe. It didn’t matter if you were as tough as Sigourney Weaver in Alien Resurrection or Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 because wherever you went there were men.
More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn’t just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere.
Louise remembered that odd fluttery feeling of having a freewheeling baby inside you, independent and dependent at the same time, an eternal maternal dialectic.
It was just as well the baby was strapped into his high chair, because every so often he would suddenly fling out his arms and legs and try to launch himself into the air like a suicidal starfish.
It just went to show, you never knew what you were going to feel until you felt it.
His body was exhausted, but his brain had apparently discovered a secret amphetamine factory and was popping pills at will. The picture on the wall opposite his bed was.
Untouched by morning and untouched by noon, sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, rafter of satin and roof of stone.’ Emily Dickinson.
We could buy a sewing machine and share it,” Charlene said. “We could buy cloth and spools of thread and paper patterns and spend pleasant winter evenings dressmaking together. Perhaps by the soft light from beautiful glass oil lamps. We could sit in a pool of golden light from the beautiful glass oil lamps and our silver needles would glimmer and flash as we bowed our heads to the simple yet honest work.” But.
Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. “Gone,” she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. “Just like that. All that exercise for nothing.
Sylvie’s children really only came into focus for her when in isolation. Together, they were an unwieldy flock, singly they had character.
Right up until the end, Victor’s mind had been as methodical as an efficient library, whereas Amelia felt that hers was more like the cupboard under the stair where ancient hockey sticks were shoved in beside broken Hoovers and boxes of old Christmas decorations, and the one thing you knew was in there – a five-amp fuse, a tin of tan shoe polish, a Phillips screwdriver – would almost certainly be the one thing you couldn’t lay your hands on.
Well, we all get on,’ Sylvie said, ‘one way or another. And in the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there.’ It.
People have the wrong idea about fairy tales, they think they’re about being rescued by handsome princes, whereas really they’re like Girl Guide handbooks.
But melancholy, that was his own true humor. A miserable bastard, in other words.
It was like dealing with Rasputin, not a middle-aged woman from Wolverhampton.
Life’s random,” he said. “The best you can do is pick up the pieces.
Love. Love wasn’t sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. Love wasn’t patient, love wasn’t kind. Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.