He’s got that way of believing his opinion is the truth, but he’s not disagreeable about it. He’s too sure he’s right to bother being disagreeable.
The old adage – humor is the best way to make the unbearable bearable – may be true.
It was so kind of you to write to me about your experiences during the Occupation. At the war’s end, I, too, promised myself that I had done with talking about it. I had talked and lived war for six years, and I was longing to pay attention to something – anything – else. But that is like wishing I were someone else. The war is now the story of our lives, and there’s no subtracting it.
None of us had any experience with literary societies, so we made our own rules: we took turns speaking about the books we’d read. At the start, we tried to be calm and objective, but that soon fell away, and the purpose of the speaker was to goad the listeners into wanting to read the book themselves. Once two members had read the same book, they could argue, which was our great delight. We read books, talked books, argued over books, and became dearer and dearer to one another.
I should pity you, did I not know, that the Mind will make friends of any thing.” A Mind that can make friends of any thing – I thought of that often during the war.
And down the street – I’m not averting my eyes now – a man in a patched jumper is painting the door to his house sky blue. Two small boys, who have been walloping one another with sticks, are begging him to let them help. He is giving them a tiny brush apiece. So – perhaps there is an end to war.
I wish I’d known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, plane-load after plane-load of them – and come off ships down in the harbor! All I could think of was damn them, damn them, over and over. If I could have thought the words “the bright day is done and we are for the dark,” I’d have been consoled somehow and ready to go out and contend with circumstance – instead of my heart sinking to my shoes.
She was showing me her treasures, Sophie – her eyes did not leave my face once. We were both so solemn, and I, for once, didn’t start crying; I just held out my arms. She climbed right into them and under the covers with me – and went sound asleep.
It’s a real lightning bolt, this Science of Phrenology. I’ve found out more in the last three days than I knew in my whole life before. Mrs. Guilbert has always been a nasty one, but now I know that she can’t help it – she’s got a big pit in her Benevolence spot. She fell in the quarry when she was a girl, and my guess is she cracked her Benevolence and was never the same since.
On the page, I’m perfectly charming, but that’s just a trick I learned. It has nothing to do with me.
The German officers said any soldier caught stealing food from our gardens would be shot. One poor soldier was caught stealing a potato. He was chased by his own people and climbed up a tree to hide. But they found him and shot him down out of the tree. Still, that did not stop them from stealing food. I am not pointing a finger at those practices, because some of us were doing the same. I figure hunger makes you desperate when you wake to it every morning.
I did not throw ‘The Shepherd Boy Sings in the Valley of Humiliation’ at the audience. I threw it at the elocution mistress. I meant to cast it at her feet, but I missed.
He thinks that if one cares deeply about someone or something new one throws a kind of energy out into the world, and “fruitfulness” is drawn in.
Real dyed-in-the-wool booksellers – like Sophie and me – can’t lie. Our faces are always a dead giveaway. A lifted brow or curled lip reveals that it’s a poor excuse for a book, and the clever customers ask for a recommendation instead, whereupon we frog-march them over to a particular volume and command them to read it. If they read it and despise it, they’ll never come back. But if they like it, they’re customers for life.
A sunny nature? A light heart? I have never been so insulted. Light-hearted is a short step from witless in my book. A cackling buffoon.
Do you remember the first job your sister and I had in London? In crabby Mr. Hawke’s secondhand bookshop? How I loved him – he’d simply unpack a box of books, hand one or two to us and say, “No cigarette ashes, clean hands – and for God’s sake, Juliet, none of your margin notes! Sophie, dear, don’t let her drink coffee while she reads.” And off we’d go with new books to read.
Once two members had read the same book, they could argue, which was our great delight. We read books, talked books, argued over books, and became dearer and dearer to one another.
I miss the feeling that we understood one another, but I begin to think that was only my delusion all along.
While I question her taste, her judgment, her misplaced priorities, and her inappropriate sense of humor, she does indeed have one fine quality – she is honest.
Bin ich zu anspruchsvoll? Ich will nicht heiraten, nur um verheiratet zu sein. Ich kann mir nichts Einsameres vorstellen, als den Rest meines Lebens mit jemandem zu teilen, mit dem ich nicht reden oder, schlimmer noch, mit dem ich nicht schweigen kann.