No point in thinking, she said briskly, you just have to get on with life. (She really was turning into Miss Woolf.) We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it righ...
Life’s random, he said. The best you can do is pick up the pieces.
Juliet and Hartley had long ago abandoned manners with each other. It was refreshing to behave without respect towards someone.
It would be like a Hardy novel, before it all goes wrong.
It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.
I was distracted suddenly from these pleasant thoughts by noticing that, like the eyes in certain portraits, Heather’s nipples seemed to have the uncanny ability to follow you around the room. This is...
I loved him so much. Love him so much. I don’t know why I use the past tense. It’s not as if love dies with the beloved.
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...
How useful Mr. Carver’s Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.)
Her heart swelled with the high holiness of it all. Imminence was all around. She was both warrior and shining spear. She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the dar...
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...
Giselle would rouse herself from her torpor occasionally (she moved like a particularly lazy cat) in order to despise something.
Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and se...
Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested. E
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.
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...
Ah, but the rich are different,’ the footman said, ‘they take a lot more looking after.
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...