A fool too late bewares when all the peril is past.
‘Sacrifice,’ Sylvie said, is a word that makes people feel noble about slaughter.) But,
Fairy tales opened up a door into my imagination - they don't conform to the reality that's around you as a child. I started reading when I was three and read everything, but I wanted to be an actress...
Who is to say which of these is real and which a fiction? In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.
What if she were simply to open her bedroom window and throw herself out, head first? Would she really be able to come back and start again? Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, a...
The dogs had got into the graveyard and were now moving like Hoovers across the ground, their noses down, their tails up, their small dog brains consumed with the idea of uncharted territory and a tho...
Suspected everyone did—from Winnie, the least pulchritudinous,
Names that were so bad that when they dared to whisper them (bitch-cunt-whore-poet) to each other beneath the bedclothes, they were like poison in the air.
Let’s face it, no one warned you about anything.
It was one of those questions you couldn’t ask in case he were to tell the truth.
Her proficiency in the Classics would somehow stand her in better stead when opening and closing filing-cabinet drawers and conducting endless searches among a sea of buff-coloured folders. It wasn’t...
Every increased possession loads us with weariness, and he’s right. There
Bluestocking, Nancy. Married life has quite changed something
Anthroposophy, spiritualism. Everyone needs to make sense
[…] but her mother's death had revealed that there was no metaphor too ostentatious for grief. It was a terrible thing and demanded embellishment.
[She] went around with a beatific smile on her face that could be very irritating if you yourself weren't feeling beatific.
You did not need a God (Sylvie was an unconfessed atheist) to believe in sin. She
Writing felt like something she knew, although she only knew it from the other side – reading – and it took her a while to realize that writing and reading were completely different activities – polar...
Women seemed to him to be in possession of all kinds of undesirable properties, chiefly madness.
Why make it easy when you could make it as difficult for yourself as possible? She was a woman, so, technically speaking, she could do anything.