The disaster of being old was in not feeling safe to venture anywhere, of seeing freedom put out of reach.
Her work failed her. She had reached a desperate, claustrophobic stage of being imprisoned halfway in a novel: there was too much behind her for her to retreat and not a glimmer of light ahead. She sat for hours without writing, staring at the last few wrods on the page, seeing no significance in them. Her characters fell into frozen poses, speech died on their lips: they had sat at a banquet for weeks and she had not the power to bring them to their feet again.
Men are not forced to turn their desolation to advantage as women are. It’s easier for them to dissipate their passion, quell their restlessness in other ways.
All that she saw and felt tired her, and she longed to shut out the world and be secure in the womb of her imagination.
Departure in the afternoon is depressing to those who are left. The day is so dominated by the one who has gone and, although only half-done, must be got through with that particular shadow lying over it.
One is left so much on one’s own. People are shy of the bereaved. They don’t quite know what to be.
She went on slowly and dreamily along the shore. Beautiful women do not need to hurry.
Nearing fifty, Vinny felt more than ever the sweet disappointments only a romantic knows, whose very desires invite frustration; who loves twilight rather than midday, the echo more than the voice, the moon more than the sun, and women better than men;.
The rain hit the windows like rice; the fire roared hollowly; the autumn afternoon discoloured into darkness.
Seeing one face continually in crowds is one of the minor annoyances of being in love.
I’ve been pronounced dead and I’ve read my own obituaries. And they were the best reviews I ever read.
She had about her a strong smell of hair-spray and her lunch-time whisky.
She seemed to be lovely still to herself, as if no amount of looking into mirrors could ruin her illusion.
Time went by. It could be proved that it did, although so little happened.
The day comes in slowly to those who are ill. The night has separated them from the sleepers, who return to them like strangers from a distant land, full of clumsy preparations for the living, the earth itself creaking towards the light.
If you hate it, if you find you have made a mistake, it will still have been a change. As with a holiday, if it ends in your wishing to come home, its aim is accomplished.
None wished to appear greedy, or obsessed by food; but food made the breaks in the day, and menus offered a little choosing, and satisfactions and disappointments, as once life had.
From somewhere–most certainly not from his mother–he had inherited a feeling that Sunday was a day of rest, and so he fretted through it, and always came to the end of it with a sense of wide ennui and wasted time.
The dead belonged to her as no one living could have done.
Oliver Davenant did not merely read books. He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his eyes with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of words.
People want things to be complicated, but they have to love themselves first and then each other and then it will seed everywhere.