What a good husband you are, Nancy said afterward, always taking your wife's side rather than your mother's. It's the side of reason I am on, Teddy said. It just so happens that that's where you're al...
We’re dying from the moment we’re born,
Viola was a good reader, a bookworm—a phrase she hated. How can a worm be a nice thing to be? Viola said. I would be a worm, Nancy thought, if that was the only existence on offer, and then laughed at...
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...
Ursula had grown rather callous about George Glover’s lungs, she had heard so much of them that they seemed to have a life of their own, rather like Sylvie’s mother’s lungs, organs that seemed to have...
Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness... At work, they regarded her as a person apart... They imagined there must be more to her. A dark horse. And still waters run deep. They would be disap...
Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.
They have no sense of humour whatsoever – even Bunty has a sense of humour compared with our hosts. They have united Prussian gloom and Presbyterian dourness in an awesome combination.
There’s too much history in York, the past is so crowded that sometimes it feels as if there’s no room for the living.
The world inside his head was so much better than the world outside his head.
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...
The more Viola forgot her mother, the more she missed her.
The last thing she wanted was people looking for her. No, that wasn't true--the last thing she wanted was people finding her.
The brooding landscape they were currently traversing, the lowering sky above their heads and the rugged terrain beneath their feet, were all conspiring to make her feel like an unfortunate Brontë sis...
The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself from the grit. From the truth...
That was the one thing June had been terrified of having - a standard life, an ordinary life, a life like her parents’ - living in a pink sandstone semi-detached villa in the suburbs with a neat garde...
That was the moment at which he realized that he had possibly become unhinged. What did it matter? The whole world was unhinged.
That was how you lost people, a little carelessness and they just slipped through your fingers.
Teddy thought of his wife and his sister as two sides of the same shining coin. Nancy was an idealist, Ursula a realist; Nancy an optimist with a lively heart, while Ursula’s spirit was freighted with...
Sweet sixteen, Hugh said, kissing her affectionately. Happy birthday, little bear. Your future's all ahead of you. Ursula still harbored the feeling that some of her future was also behind her but she...