Discretion being the better part of valour,
Did God get out of bed one morning and draw back the curtains (Reggie's imaginary God led a very domesticated life) and think, 'A drowning in a hotel swimming pool, I fancy. We haven't had that one in...
Choice, it seemed, was one of the first casualties of war.
Bridget wouldn’t let Trixie come to Mrs. Dodds’s house, she said she would never hear the end of it. She doesn’t believe in dogs, Bridget said. Dogs are hardly an article of faith, Sylvie said.
And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very har...
A fool too late bewares when all the peril is past.
‘The mistake,’ Sylvie said, ‘is thinking that love equates with happiness.’)
Pam wasn't what Gloria would have called a friend, just someone she had known for so long that she had given up trying to get rid of her.
I'm a lapsed Quaker. I don't go to meetings any more. But I'm very drawn to Catholicism - all that glitter. I'd love to be a Catholic. I think it would be fantastic - faith, forgiveness, absolution, e...
Was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets?
Step
Winter dark, five o'clock in the morning by the little gold carriage clock on the bedroom mantelpiece. The clock, an English one ('Better than a French one', her mother had instructed), had been one o...
When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wil...
When everything else has gone, love still remains, Dr. Hunter said. Totally, Reggie said. But what good did it do you? None at all.
What did science ever do for the world, apart from make better ways of killing people?
We cannot turn away, Miss Woolf told her, we must get on with our job and we must bear witness. What did that mean, Ursula wondered. It means, Miss Woolf said, that we must remember these people when...
Viola could start again—there are no second chances, life’s not a rehearsal, blah, blah, blah—yes, but if she could, if she could retake the journey that wasn’t really a journey, what would she do? Sh...
Ursula missed the sound of church bells. There were so many simple things she had taken for granted before the war. She wished that she could go back and appreciate them properly.
There are some Buddhist philosophers (a branch referred to as Zen) who say that sometimes a bad thing happens to prevent a worse thing happening,
The dead were legion and the gods had their own secret agenda.
