She said science had made the world a worse place, that it was all about men inventing new ways to kill people.
She had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost.
She could see Sylvie and her friends on the lawn below, their dresses fluttering like moths in the encroaching dusk.
Now Viola could see the value of sounding chirpy even when you didn’t feel like it. You were more likely to get what you wanted, for one thing.
Hooligan posse of gulls wheeled noisily overhead,
Her. It was a cruel thing, trying to sprout and find the light of day. It was truth. She wasn’t sure that she wanted it.
Everything was ephemeral, yet everything was eternal,
Do a typing and shorthand
Continually amazed at just how many skills and crafts could go into making a lovely home—the patchwork quilts you could sew, the curtains you could ruffle, the cucumbers you could pickle, the rhubarb...
You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.
Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.
What on earth was she doing with her life? Could she just get up and leave?
What did science ever do for the world, apart from make better ways of killing people? Sylvie said.
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...
Ursula tried to remember what her own last words to her father had been. A nonchalant 'See you later,' she concluded. The final irony. 'We never know when it will be the last time,' she said...
Untouched by morning and untouched by noon, sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, rafter of satin and roof of stone.’ Emily Dickinson.
There was something to be said for dying before you ended up in incontinence pads, watching an endless loop of reruns of Friends.
There was a strangeness in the shimmering air, a sense of imminence that made Ursula’s chest feel full, as if her heart was growing. It was a kind of high holiness—she could think of no other way of d...
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 triumph of the human spirit, the new nursing sister said, new enough to talk about positive outcomes and enhancement programmes—emollient management-speak, meaningless to most of the residents of...