Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
I had been in love all year, or at least since the first week in September, when a boy named Martin Collingwood had given me a surprised, appreciative, and rather ominously complacent smile in the school assembly. I never knew what surprised him; I was not looking like anybody but me; I had an old blouse on and my home-permanent had turned out badly.
Alas he had forgotten, he said, that she was a novelist as well as a mathematician. What a disappointment for the Parisian that he was neither. Merely a scholar, and a man.
The final four works are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life.
Forgiveness in families is a mystery to me, how it comes or how it lasts.
She didn’t really plan to travel there. She said there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for but never did get to see.
It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there.
The thing about life, Harry had told Lauren, was to live in the world with interest. To keep your eyes open and see the possibilities – see the humanity – in everybody you met. To be aware. If he had anything at all to teach her it was that. Be aware.
I went around the house to the back door thinking, I have been to a dance and a boy has walked me home and kissed me. It was all true. My life was possible.
I am a woman of violent contradiction.
The stinging nettles that we must have got into are more insignificant plants, with a paler purple flower, and stalks wickedly outfitted with fine, fierce, skin-piercing and inflaming spines. Those would be present too, unnoticed, in all the flourishing of the waste meadow.
We had a hard life but we didn’t know it... We had power... it’s a power of transformation you have, when you’re stuffed full of fear and eagerness – not a thing in your life can escape being momentous. A power you never think of losing because you never know you have it.
I have a feeling that is so hard to describe. It’s like a boiled egg in my chest, with the shell left on.
The last days of May are among the longest of the year.
There are times when girls are inspired, when they want the risks to go on and on. They want to be heroines, regardless. They want to take a joke beyond where anybody has ever taken it before. To be careless, dauntless, to create havoc – that was the lost hope of girls.
It occurred to him, and had occurred to him before, that there was after all something to be said for dealing with things the way most people of his age seemed to do. It was sensible perhaps to stop noticing, to believe that this was still the same world they were living in, with some dreadful but curable aberrations, never to understand how the whole arrangement had altered.
I just think it would be beautiful,′ she says. ‘I think it would be beautiful if a woman could.
You know one reason I know he’s not dead?′ said Sonje. ‘I don’t dream about him.
To be made of flesh was humiliation.
On the way home he had explained that she wasn’t his type. And she had felt too humiliated to retort – or even to be aware, at that moment – that he was not hers.
Learning to survive, no matter with what cravenness and caution, what shocks and forebodings, is not the same as being miserable. It is too interesting.