It was Hester herself, made word.
In the background is the hiss of the gas heater; we hear the sound without hearing it for, side by side, together and miles apart, we are deep in our books.
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
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.
Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Im...
His confidences, this mist, had led us unexpectedly onto a peninsula of intimacy, and I found myself on the brink of telling what I had never told anyone before. The words flew ready-formed into my he...
Her presence could be divined in any number of ways by those who had eyes to see. Yet she was not seen.
He turned from the daughters of minor aristocrats to those of farriers, farmers and foresters. Personally he couldn't tell the difference, yet the world seemed to mind less.
For it must be very lonely being dead.
Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating.
Don't be so polite. If there's one thing I can't abide, it's politeness.
But there was more. Did she know I had noticed? I had made no outward sign. But I had noticed. Today Miss Winter had said I.
But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.
Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.
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...
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...
Just ’cause a thing’s impossible don’t mean it can’t happen.
And goings, and the past and the present touch and overlap. Unexpected things can happen.
William Henry Cadwalladr
Wait! he said. Hold your scolding till you know what I have come to tell you!