My status is a problem, they obviously think I’m married. But I’m safe, I’m wearing my ring, I never threw it out, it’s useful for landladies. I sent my parents a postcard after the wedding, they must have mentioned it to Paul; that, but not the divorce. It isn’t part of the vocabulary here, there’s no reason to upset them.
This is what Elizabeth cannot forgive. She can’t forgive her own treachery. Auntie Muriel must not be allowed to get away with it. She must, for Elizabeth’s benefit, visibly suffer. At last.
But unshed tears can turn you rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue.
My father has simply disappeared then, vanished into nothing. When I got Paul’s letter – “You’re father is gone, nobody can’t find him” – it seemed incredible, but it appears to be true.
Desire does not die with the body’... ‘Only the ability to satisfy it.
I have decided to encourage the young. Once I wouldn’t have done this, but now I have nothing to lose. The young are not my rivals. Fish are not the rivals of stones.
Orphans are such flirts, they’ll hook up with anyone, then they tear up their phone books, they discard at random. They show no mercy.
From everything you’ve told me,” Lesje said, “she hated that aunt.” Nate said that although this was true, the aunt had been important in Elizabeth’s life. In his opinion the importance of something to someone had nothing to do with its positive qualities but only with its impact, its force, and the aunt had been a force.
The play you hold in your hands is an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo.
Home is where the heart is and the orphans are heartless.
It’s long been her theoretical opinion that Man is a danger to the universe, a mischievous ape, spiteful, destructive, malevolent. But only theoretical. Really she believed that if people could see how they were acting they would act some other way. Now she knows this isn’t true.
War stories, that’s what they want – war stories, and disgusting menus. They want suffering, they want scars.
Nate hasn’t yet frightened her by asking her to tell him about herself, though he’s been talking since they sat down. She ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk. She listens, eating in small bites, concealing her teeth.
Lesje herself doesn’t know how she would vote. She thinks she would probably move, instead. Nationalism of any kind makes her uneasy. In her parents’ house it was a forbidden subject.
WITHOUT MEMORY, there is no debt. Put another way: without story, there is no debt.
Both grandmothers spoke as if they personally had been through the war, had been gassed, raped, run through with bayonets, shot, starved, bombed and cremated, and had by a miracle survived; which wasn’t true.
The young look up at you, wide-eyed. Or maybe they look down at you; they’ve become very tall. How young are the young, these days? It varies. Some of them are quite old. But they are still credulous, because you were there, once upon a time, and they were not.
David is slipping into his yokel dialect; he does it for fun, it’s a parody of himself, the way he says he talked back in the fifties when he wanted to be a minister and was selling Bibles door to door to put himself through theological seminary.
The next day at school there were whisperings. I tried to ignore them, though I couldn’t help hearing the odd phrase: Cuckoo as a clock. Addled as an egg. Crazy as a box of hair. Mad as a sack of hammers. And the worst: No man in the house, so what can you expect?
I’ve noticed that most retired old men feel like that: the world simply cannot function minus their services. It’s not that they feel useless; they feel unused.