The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.
She kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.
He thought other resourceful people would have come, over the years, to look at it, and that the house would wear its own mild frown of self-regard, a certain half-friendly awareness of being admired....
All families are silly in their own way.
After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live N...
The peculiar things a singer did with words, the vowels that turned into other vowels under the strain of a high note, made it all harder and weirder. Picturing
It was a refinement of teasing, where you were never told why your answer was wrong.
Ricky clearly never hurried, he was his own lazy happening.
I thought, these are the evening routines which will soon be mine, the tug of an unknown suburb, or a bar, or a lover.
Nick felt a tear rise to his eye at the thought of the child's utter innocence of hangovers.
I can’t bear the smell of cigars, can you? said Lady Partridge. Lionel hates it too, murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of...
He knew he was giving off the mischievous contentment of someone left behind for an afternoon, sleepy hints that he might have got up to something but in fact had done the more enviable and inexplicab...
And something else came back, from that later first morning at Kensington Park Gardens: a sense that the house was not only an enhancement of Toby's interest but a compensation for his lack of it.
She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well.
Peter was that magic person we all meet, if we’re lucky, who shows us how to live our lives, and be ourselves.
He somehow saw that to her being drunk had its whole long sentimental history, whereas to him it was a freakish novelty.
He seemed to fade pretty quickly. He found himself yearning to know of their affairs, their successes, the novels and the new ideas that the few who remembered him might say he never knew, he never li...
Then he stood up straight, sprang the catches, and released the heady and authentic gentleman’s smell: toilet water, starch, and the slowly fading reek of leather.
It is hard to do justice to old pleasures that cannot be revived—we seem half to disown our youthful selves, who loved and treasured them.
In truth the memoir was a game of postponement – a trick he played on himself almost daily, and fell for every time. There would be a poor and evasive morning, with letters to write as well, and a num...