Life is too precious to be unhappy.
She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.
How wonderfully, joyously, untrammeled he had been then in his happiness. She thought it was fixed for ever, she didn’t realize that childhood happiness dissolves away. If she had realized that Archie wasn’t going to be that sunny innocent child for ever she would have laid up every moment as treasure.
I have no idea how to love another human being unless it’s by tearing them to pieces and eating them.
She would be happy – but not excessively so...
Gloria regretted that she wasn’t a knitter, she could be producing a useful garment while waiting for Graham to die.
Must you always see the dark side of everything?’ Julia said. ‘Someone has to,’ Jackson said. ‘Yes, but does it have to be you?’ Apparently, yes. It did.
He could hardly beat them up, they were still – technically – children and he preferred to restrict his acts of violence to people old enough to fight for their country.
It’s funny, isn’t it,” Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula’s ear, “how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.
Boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds. Everything was connected. Everything in the whole world.
One of the things Jackson liked about Julia was her independence, one of the things he didn’t like about Julia was her independence.
Why make it easy when you could make it as difficult for yourself as possible? She was a woman, so, technically speaking, she could do anything.
Really she was just like everyone else, she wanted to love someone. Even better if they loved you in return. She was considering getting a cat. She didn’t really like cats though. That might be a bit of a problem. Quite liked dogs.
Marlee was fourteen. A dangerous age, although, let’s face it, Jackson thought, every age was a dangerous age for a woman.
The kid looked up from her wampum and stared inscrutably at her and then, for the first time since Tracy bought her, Courtney smiled. A beatific sunbeam of a smile. Tracy beamed back, a bubble-burst of mixed emotion – ecstasy and agony in equal, confusing measure inside her – rising in her chest. Jesus. How did parents manage with this kind of stuff on a daily basis? She found herself blinking back tears.
Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn’t just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.
The war had been a tide that had receded and now here it was lapping around her ankles again.
No one ever warned you about how ferocious mother love could be, let’s face it, no one warned you about anything.
Our own homegrown evil, I’m sorry to say. And instead of rooting them out, the plan is to let them flourish – but within a walled garden from which they cannot escape and spread their evil seed.” A girl could die of old age following a metaphor like this, Juliet thought. “Very nicely put, sir,” she said.
Not his real home, his real home, the one he never named any more, was the dark and sooty chamber in his heart that contained his sister and his brother and, because it was an accommodating kind of space, the entire filthy history of the industrial revolution.