How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.
He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father.
My parents were keen for me to have the education they themselves never had. They weren't able to guide me towards particular books, but they encouraged me to read, which I did, randomly and compulsiv...
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
The conversation had turned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other
Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.
No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It's an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.
It's shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum's sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?
Every secret of the body was rendered up--bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine or an optic nerve. From this new and intimate perspective, [Briony] learned a simple, obvious...
All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.
No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.
By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadv...
Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.
The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.
She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn’t let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.
Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.
No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions.
I squeezed her hand and said nothing. I knew little about Keats or his poetry, but I thought it possible that in his hopeless situation he would not have wanted to write precisely because he loved her...
He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now.