Amelia had no secrets, Amelia knew nothing. When she grew up she planned to know everything and to keep it all a secret.
After that Sylvie made sure they all went to the swimming baths in town and took lessons, from an ex-major in the Boer War who barked orders at them until they were too frightened to sink.
Dr. Kellet said, “it’s a snake with its tail in its mouth.” He nodded approvingly and said to Sylvie, “It’s a symbol representing the circularity of the universe. Time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now.
Pamela produced placid babies. “They don’t tend to turn feral until they’re two,” she said.
Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally.
And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very hard not to hear of. If Bob could have designed a girl he would have started by getting rid of her vocal cords.
Sometimes Teddy wondered if everyone had done well out of the war except for those who had fought in it.
He has been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future.
Sister Michael turned and looked at him, and, despite her plump, jolly face, she had nuns’ eyes, and nuns’ eyes, Jackson knew, could see right inside your head, so he nodded respectfully at the statue. Sanguis Christi, inebria me.
She remembered holding Pamela’s babies – remembered Teddy and Jimmy, too – how overwhelming the feelings of love and terror, the desperate desire to protect. How much stronger would those feelings be if it were her own child? Perhaps too strong to bear. Over.
Sacrifice, by its nature, was predicated on giving, not receiving. “ ‘Sacrifice,’ ” he remembered.
Don’t seek out elaborate metaphors,” her English teacher had said of her school essays, but her mother’s death had revealed that there was no metaphor too ostentatious for grief. It was a terrible thing and demanded embellishment.
Viola was a good reader, a bookworm – a phrase she hated. “How can a worm be a nice thing to be?” Viola said. I would be a worm, Nancy thought, if that was the only existence on offer, and then laughed at herself for having reached such a pass. “Without worms we wouldn’t be able to grow food and everyone would starve,” Nancy said reasonably.
She was twenty-eight but already jaded. Twenty-eight seemed a particularly unsatisfactory age. She was no longer young and yet no one ever seemed to take her seriously as an adult. People still told her what to do all the time, it was infuriating. Her only power seemed to be over her own children and even that was limited by endless negotiation.
The Germans were victims of the Nazis too, but one can’t say that too loudly, of course.
It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. It simply was. You were either moved by it or you weren’t.
The Knights’ Code,” which he had learned by heart from Scouting for Boys, a book he frequently turned to in times of uncertainty, even now in his self-exile from the movement, demanded that “Chivalry requireth that youth should be trained to perform the most laborious and humble offices with cheerfulness and grace.” He supposed entertaining Izzie was one of those occasions. It was certainly laborious.
The gods were on the point of giving up when Brahma said, ‘I know where we will hide man’s divinity, we will hide it inside him. he will search the whole world but never look inside and find what is already within.
He caught the look on her face, a mixture of distaste and confusion which eventually resolved into something more cryptic. Women usually needed to be acquainted with him a little longer before he saw that expression on their faces.
All those unclaimed arms and legs lost in the fields of Flanders – Ursula imagined them pushing roots down into the mud and shoots up to the sky and growing once again into men. An army of men marching back for revenge.