How calm the house was. How deceptive that could be. One could lose everything in the blink of an eye, the slip of a foot. “One must avoid dark thoughts at all costs,” she said to Ursula.
But I know nothing; my future is a wide-open vista, leading to an unknown country – The Rest Of My Life.
He was officially a lunatic, she decided. Strangely, that didn’t make him less attractive.
Ursula tried to remember what her own last words to her father had been. A nonchalant ‘See you later,’ she concluded. The final irony. ‘We never know when it will be the last time,’ she said...
I was distracted suddenly from these pleasant thoughts by noticing that, like the eyes in certain portraits, Heather’s nipples seemed to have the uncanny ability to follow you around the room. This is the kind of observation that once made, cannot be unmade. Unfortunately.
Amelia looked at the eggs-like sickly, jaundiced eyes-and thought of her own eggs, a handful left, old shrivelled like musty dried fruit where once they must have been bursting toward the light-.
Sylvie was surprised by the rabid patriotism of the women on the platform, surely war should make pacifists of all women?
A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn’t.
Don’t you wonder sometimes,′ Ursula said. ‘If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in – I don’t know, say, a Quaker household – surely things would be different.
They have no sense of humour whatsoever – even Bunty has a sense of humour compared with our hosts. They have united Prussian gloom and Presbyterian dourness in an awesome combination.
Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was – wasn’t everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind?
If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn’t mind being their mother.
When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone’s head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you’d cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.
I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.
She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn’t even have the strength to feel guilty.
Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.
Sylvia loved secrets and even if she didn’t have any secrets she made sure that you thought she did. Amelia had no secrets, Amelia knew nothing. When she grew up she planned to know everything and to keep it all a secret.
I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed.
Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.
They said love made you strong, but in Louise’s opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn’t get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.