She opened her arms to the black bat and they flew to each other, embracing in the air like long-lost souls. This is love, Ursula thought. And the practice of it makes it perfect.
She felt as if she had been on the outside of happiness her whole life.
Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my...
Pamela produced placid babies. They don't tend to turn feral until they're two, she said.
One’s own life seemed puny against the background of so much history.
One of the things Jackson liked about Julia was her independence, one of the things he didn’t like about Julia was her independence.
Not
Nostalgia is predicated on something that never existed.
Nancy fell in love with Viola at first sight of her. A coup de foudre, she said, more intense and overwhelming than any form of romantic love. Mother and daughter were each a world to the other, compl...
Love at first sight, she wrote giddily to Millie. But of course such feelings weren't 'true' love (that was what she would feel for a child one day), merely the false grandeur of madness.
Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.
Lily was a Fabian, a society suffragette who risked nothing
In Teddy’s experience people who claimed to be one thing were generally the opposite,
I really such a terrible mother?’ she asked Bertie. ‘Why the past tense?’ Bertie said. Sow
I have no idea how to love another human being unless it’s by tearing them to pieces and eating them.
I have been to the world's end and back and now I know what I would put in my bottom drawer. I would put my sisters.
How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him? Ursula wondered. It seemed to her that in the search for arguments against marriage the existence of Maurice presented the v...
He likes women, children, dogs, really what can you fault?’ Pamela wrote. ‘It’s just a shame he’s a dictator with no respect for the law or common humanity.
He has been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future.
Don't let your imagination run away with you, Miss Armstrong. But why would you not when the reality was so awful? And that was that. Juliet's war.