People sometimes forget how to be happy due to a "failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they ha...
When she found a place of her ownand packed her bags he asked her to marry him. She kissed him, and quoted in his ear,He married a woman to stop her getting away, Now she’s there all day.
This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.
These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and...
The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, the...
The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and...
The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good m...
She sleepwalked from moment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will.
She left the cafe, and as she walked along the Common she felt the distance widen between her and another self, no less real, who was walking back toward the hospital. Perhaps the Briony who was walki...
Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air
Over a quarter of a century ago she and Vernon had made a household for almost a year, in a tiny rooftop flat on the rue de Seine. There were always damp towels on the floor then, and cataracts of her...
Now he reduced his progress to the rhythm of his boots -- he walked across the land until he came to the sea. Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that...
Most houses were crammed with immovable objects in their proper places, and each object told you what to do - here you ate, here you slept, here you sat. I tried to imagine carpets, wardrobes, picture...
Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.
It was the reason he had survived. It was the ordinary way of saying she would refuse all other men. Only you. Come back.
It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, o...
It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.
In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world.
I've heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness...Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are...
I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!