Jake, I don’t want ever to be old. I want always to get up in the morning and feel there’s something grand lying just ahead of me, round the corner, over a hill. I want always to feel that if I stand...
It was then that Maxim looked at me. He looked at me for the first time that evening. And in his eyes I read the message of farewell. It was as though he leant against the side of a ship, and I stood...
It was strange how a person came full circle. How a man was once a baby and a boy, and then a lover and a father, and now a child again. It was strange that once she had been a little girl, climbing o...
It was as though there was some latent power in his fingers which turned them from bludgeons into deft and cunning servants. Had he cut her a chunk of bread and hurled it at her she would not have min...
In two minutes she would have forgotten all about having asked Celia for the day, and would be planning something else. If only Maria lived a little closer, Celia could have shared the responsibility...
In those days, before the First World War, young women did not use makeup. Anna was free of lipstick, and her gold hair was rolled in great coils over her ears.
In memory of Robert Harris, sometime Major-General of His Majesty's forces before Plymouth, who was buried hereunder the 29th day of June 1655. And of Honor Harris his sister, who was likewise here un...
If my mother had known what small seed of longing she was sowing in my brother’s being, to develop into a folie de grandeur that nearly broke my father’s heart, and certainly was partly responsible fo...
If death came now, he would be an ally; existence was not a thing she welcomed anymore. Life had been crushed from her anyway, and the body lying on the bed did not belong to her. She had no wish to l...
I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one isalone.
I remembered as a child standing in a field where a stream crossed my path, and a yellow iris grew next a background of green rushes. The stream sang as it tumbled over the flat stones. And as a child...
I put Manderley first, before anything else. And it does not prosper, that sort of love. They don't preach about it in the churches. Christ said nothing about stones, and bricks, and walls, the love t...
I know I must seem unsympathetic and cold, but this is the nineteenth century, you know, and men don’t murder one another without reason. I believe I have as much right to drive you on the King’s high...
I don't know what stuff her gowns were made of, whether of stiff silk, or satin, or brocade, but they seemed to sweep the floor, and lift, and sweep again; and whether it was the gown itself that floa...
I did not know what to answer, because it would be too sudden and too direct, but I knew in my heart that what I wanted was everything that could be between a woman and a man; not at first, of course,...
I could fight the living but I could not fight the dead.
I am aware of sadness, of a sense of loss. Here, I say, we have lived, we have been happy. This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we lea...
H’mph, growled the squire, that’s a damned nuisance. I wanted a word or two with Mr. Joss Merlyn. Now look here, my good woman, your precious husband may have bought Jamaica Inn behind my back, in his...
However grim and hateful was this new country, however barren and untilled, with Jamaica Inn standing alone upon the hill as a buffer to the four winds, there was a challenge in the air that spurred M...
How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from th...