Discretion being the better part of valour,
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.
Because life is an adventure, of course.I would say it was more of an endurance race, Sylvie said. Or an obstacle course.
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....
All the men in the family went to the school, his Hampstead grandmother said (his only grandmother, Sylvie’s mother having died long ago), as if it were a law, written down in ancient times. Teddy sup...
About the Book He had 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.
A boy grows and marries and leaves. He belongs to another woman, but a girl always belongs to her mother.
The great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.
White lilies, the kind you would give to a bride or a corpse.
Was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets?
Strangers? Millie’s swan song on the stage, the last
Royal blue frock coat covered in gold braid and, even more ridiculously, a top hat. Howell had such an imposing presence that rather than losing dignity in this flunky’s outfit he actually made it see...
He had a firm voice, a nice low register that spoke of both kindness and unassailable authority, which seemed the perfect combination in a man—in the romance novels her mother had been fond of, anyway
A common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly. Ursula
You said five little words to someone--How can I help you?--and it was as if you'd mortgaged your soul out to them.
You could guarantee a decent cup of coffee in Betty's, but it went beyond the decent coffee and the respectable girls (and women) who had been parcelled up some time in the 1930s and freshly unwrapped...
We're just cogs in a machine really, aren't we? Miss Fawcett said to her and Ursula said, But remember, without the cog there is no machine.
We could buy a sewing machine and share it, Charlene said. We could buy cloth and spools of thread and paper patterns and spend pleasant winter evenings dressmaking together. Perhaps by the soft light...
Time was a thief and Jackson felt he gained a small triumph by stealing back some of the early hours