[T]he parent-child relationship was one way, you gave them all your love and they were under no obligation to pay a penny back. Of course, if they did love you then that was the icing on the cake with...
You don’t see the point of English literature?’ ‘I don’t see the point of studying it. Surely one just reads it?
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 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...
Tracy thought she must be missing something, it felt like the same world as ever to her. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, kids everywhere falling through the cracks. The Victorians wo...
Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.
There is a Hindu legend that tells us that there was once a time when all men were gods, but they abused their divinity. Brahma, the god of creation, concluded that people had lost the right to their...
The wounds of war, Juliet thought, rather pleased with the way the words sounded in her head. It could be the title of a novel. Perhaps she should write one. But wasn’t artistic endeavor the final ref...
The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.
The toll of the dead had been her business during the war, the endless stream of figures that represented the blitzed and the bombed passed across her desk to be collated and recorded. They had seemed...
The purpose of Art is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself. SYLVIE BERESFORD TODD
The only way to stop the tears was to keep drinking the whisky.
The mind is a fathomless mystery.
The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself from the grit. From the truth...
That was the problem with time travel, of course (apart from the impossibility) – one would always be a Cassandra, spreading doom with one’s foreknowledge of events. It was quite wearyingly relentless...
That was the moment at which he realized that he had possibly become unhinged. What did it matter? The whole world was unhinged.
Terri would have made the perfect wife for Bob – they could have simply slept their way through married life. Rip van Winkle and Duchess Anaesthesia, the lost, sleepy daughter of the Romanovs.
Sylvie considered that children should be toughened up early, the better to take the blows in later life.