Winter dark, five o'clock in the morning by the little gold carriage clock on the bedroom mantelpiece. The clock, an English one ('Better than a French one', her mother had instructed), had been one o...
When Lillian left work in the early evening the streets were slick and shiny with rain and the lamps flared yellow giving her the melancholy feeling that always came with the rain and the dark. She’d...
Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally.
We cannot turn away, Miss Woolf told her, we must get on with our job and we must bear witness. What did that mean, Ursula wondered. It means, Miss Woolf said, that we must remember these people when...
Vinny rarely leaves the house so when she does it's an occasion of some importance to her. She spends a lot of time looking forward to a glimpse of the outside world and then, when she returns, even m...
There was something to be said for dying before you ended up in incontinence pads, watching an endless loop of reruns of Friends.
There are some Buddhist philosophers (a branch referred to as Zen) who say that sometimes a bad thing happens to prevent a worse thing happening,
The sour aura of dissatisfaction that seeped through the walls, along with the even less appetizing smell of boiled cabbage, was really quite depressing. Ursula wanted her refugees to be soulful and r...
The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.
The Germans were victims of the Nazis too, but one can’t say that too loudly, of course.
That was how history worked, wasn't it? If it wasn't written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at...
Sometimes it takes just one good man
She was the deer. She was the arrow, She was the queen. She was the contradiction, She was the synthesis. Juliet ran.
She was born with the winter already in her bones.
She seemed to have no inkling that life wasn't as orderly as her pencil case and that everything is chance and at any moment any number of remarkable things can happen that are totally beyond our cont...
She remembered holding Pamela’s babies – remembered Teddy and Jimmy, too – how overwhelming the feelings of love and terror, the desperate desire to protect. How much stronger would those feelings be...
She had never chosen death over life before and as she was leaving she knew something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed. Then the dark obliterated all thoughts.
People have the wrong idea about fairy tales, they think they’re about being rescued by handsome princes, whereas really they’re like Girl Guide handbooks.
People always said they wanted the truth, but really they were perfectly content with a facsimile.
Pamela, even at a distance, was the voice of her conscience, but then it was very easy to have a conscience from a distance.