Jane Eyre. Villette. The Woman in White. Middlemarch,
Ivan Lea
It was solstice night, the longest night of the year. For weeks the days had been shrinking, first gradually, then precipitously, so that it was now dark by mid-afternoon. As is well-known, when the m...
It was not the sun, but the moonlight that shimmered in the garden, edging the leaves with silver and touching the outlines of the statuary figures.
I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.
I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have pe...
I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adu...
I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child.
He was the first of my ghosts.
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...
Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.
El silencio no es el entorno natural para las historias -me dijo en una ocasión la señorita Winter-. Las historias necesitan palabras. Sin ellas palidecen, enferman y mueren. Y luego te persiguen.
And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Doe...
Alongside my mispronunciation of , and in seventeen languages, and my ability to recite the Greek alphabet forward and backward (I who have never learned a word of Greek in my life), the phonetic al...
All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the com...
People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.
Wall of yew twice
Remembered the gray cat that had appeared, as if by magic, on her lap. Silently he had sat under her stroking hand, regarding me fixedly with his round yellow eyes. If he saw my ghosts, if he saw my s...
And goings, and the past and the present touch and overlap. Unexpected things can happen.
What if the child’s dependence on her twin is so great that the separation causes a mental trauma such that the damaged mind provides solace by the creation of an imaginary twin, a fantasy companion?...