Where do they go, Sophie, those younger selves of ours? How do they vanish and dissolve?’ ‘They don’t,’ I said. ‘They’re with us always, like little shadows, ghosting us through life.
When anyone talked about beauty in that way I knew they were doing it for effect. Perhaps she wanted me to think she was intelligent. She had only to open her mouth to show me she was not.
When Stephen talked about stalking chamois his whole expression changed. The features became more aquiline, the nose sharpened, the chin narrowed, and his eyes-steel blue - somehow took on the cold br...
What was John-Henry but the outcome of the years?
We change from the awakening questing creatures we were once, afire with wonder, and expectancy, and doubt, to persons of opinion and authority, our habits formed, our characters moulded in a pattern
We all of us have our particular devil who ruses us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.
Un mēs izšķiedīsim pēdējos mirkļus, smiedamies par kādu svešinieku, jo mēs jau būsim sveši viens otram.
Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.
Thinking never did anybody any good
They were all gone, these other selves, and they would never come back again.They had vanished, like little thoughts and little dreams, poor has-beens that had lived in me and I in them, now thrown aw...
They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbe...
There was silence between them for moment, and she wondered if all women, when in love, were torn between two impulses, a longing to throw modesty and reserve to the winds and confess everything, and...
The world I knew has gone. This is tomorrow
The winter of 1789 was the hardest within living memory. No one, not even the old people of the district, had ever known anything like it. The cold weather set in early, and, coming on top of a bad ha...
The experts are right, he thought. Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns...
Mary Rose that did it. Mary Rose was a country girl. Always hiding up apple trees, and then disappearing on the island. She was a ghost, and Charles fell in love with the ghost. What did you fall in l...
But he was quite eclipsed by one of the deputies of the Third Estate, a young lawyer called Robespierre—I wonder if Pierre has heard of him?—who suggested that the Archbishop would do better if he tol...
What a bore! Especially when the day had gone so well. She had no desire to read or listen to records. His taste would be like her father’s, old Peter Cheyneys and John Buchans, he used to read them o...
Three years of marriage, he said, and the dishwasher means more to your conjugal life than the double bed I’m throwing in for good measure. I warned you it wouldn’t last. The marriage, I mean, not the...
There was something strangely peaceful about the house, something very rare and difficult to define. It was like a house in an old tale, discovered by the hero one evening in midsummer; there should b...