I think there is something wrong with the human race. It undermines everything one would like to believe in, don't you think?
I need to talk to you. People always say that, Hartley said grimly, but usually what they need is not to talk.
I heard someone say once that hindsight was a wonderful thing, that without it there would be no history.
I had an idea of him,’ Ursula said, ‘but the idea wasn’t him. Perhaps I wanted to fall in love.
How wonderfully, joyously, untrammeled he had been then in his happiness. She thought it was fixed for ever, she didn't realize that childhood happiness dissolves away. If she had realized that Archie...
Hindsight’s a wonderful thing, Klara said. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.
He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.
He was the perfect gentleman and, unlike the salesmen in the Fitzrovia hotel, there were no attempts at fumbling—in fact they often performed an awkward little dance around their small office to avoid...
He was part of the infinite. The tree and the rock and the water. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer.
Good news?’ Gloria queried. She wondered if Emily was pregnant again (was that good news?), so she was taken aback when Emily said, ‘I’ve found Jesus.’ ‘Oh,’ Gloria said. ‘Where was he?
First things were good, last things not so much so.
Fine,’ she said, using the universal Scottish word for every state of being from ‘I’m dying in anguish’ to ‘I’m experiencing euphoric joy.’ ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.
Each reported on a myriad others, filaments in an evangelistic web of treachery that stretched across the country.
Do not equate nationalism with patriotism... Nationalism is the first step on the road to Fascism.
Diamond Jubilee with him for extra contrition. Her father was clearly exhausted, sleeping almost all the time now, like an aged dog. Why didn’t he just go? Was he hanging on for a hundred? Two more ye...
Because you couldn’t make time, she’d been deluded about that. 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.
As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn’t really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history....
As I watch, the sky fills with clouds of snow feathers from every kind of bird there ever was and even some that only exist in the imagination, like the bluebirds that fly over the rainbow.
And the English soul, if it resided anywhere, was surely in some unheroic back garden—a patch of lawn, a bed of roses, a row of runner beans.
Amelia looked at the eggs-like sickly, jaundiced eyes-and thought of her own eggs, a handful left, old shrivelled like musty dried fruit where once they must have been bursting toward the light