Daddy said he would rather we were alive and cowards than dead and heroes.
But appearance and reality were different things, weren't they?
Best to avoid morbid thoughts, Ursula counselled, advice that would stand him in good stead for the next three years. For the rest of his life, in fact.
Best always to praise rather than criticize.
Because life is an adventure, of course.I would say it was more of an endurance race, Sylvie said. Or an obstacle course.
Barrage balloons dotted the sky like blind whales bobbing around in the wrong element.
As the first clod of earth hit her mother’s coffin, Juliet could barely catch a breath. Her mother would suffocate beneath all that earth, she thought, but Juliet was suffocating too. An image came to...
And she could be depressed if she wanted to be, she could sit and watch Dogs with Jobs on the National Geographic Channel and eat her way through a packet of chocolate bourbon biscuits if she felt lik...
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...
All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good women to do nothing.
Afterwards—because it turned out that there was to be an afterwards for Teddy—he resolved that he would try always to be kind. It was the best he could do. It was all that he could do. And it might be...
A woman should be a comfort and a relief, a restful pillow for the weary head.
A similar obligatory likeness of George adorned Mrs Glover’s bedside table. Trussed in uniform and uncomfortable before a studio backdrop that reminded Sylvie of the Amalfi coast, George Glover no lon...
A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment. Life was a...
No book could ever be left in the condition you found it in because it was changed every time it was read by someone.
‘Sacrifice,’ Sylvie said, is a word that makes people feel noble about slaughter.) But,
‘Do not equate nationalism with patriotism,’ Perry warned Juliet. ‘Nationalism is the first step on the road to Fascism.’)
Although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)
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...
He said that when the baby was born, if it was a boy, I was to call it Edward.Edward? Teddy repeated blankly.After you.And for the first time in the whole of the war Teddy broke.