Rebuilt in Victorian times, it retained the modesty of its medieval origins. Small and neat, its spire indicated the direction of heaven without trying to pierce a hole in it.
But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children.
I shall start at the beginning. Though of coarse, the beginning is never where you think it is.
She could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it.
Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?
There was no single moment when I thought, Aha! What a great idea! Rather there was a slow and gradual accumulation of numerous small ideas.
People with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think of them.
To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.
I’ve nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.
What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?
One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else.
Everybody has a story. It’s like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can’t say you haven’t got them. Same goes for stories.
People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.
Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.
The tears I gratified him with were fake ones. Ones that set off my green eyes the way diamonds set off emeralds. And it worked. If you dazzled a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won’t notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him. – Vida Winters Page 268.
Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.
My mother and I were like two continents moving slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, constantly extending the fragile edifice he had constructed to connect us.
But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears and she was transformed.
The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.
For it must be very lonely being dead.
She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.