32 quotes found
“How quickly the dead faded into each other,”
“We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth”
“He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father.”
“Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.”
“And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.”
“Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world.”
“The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no goo...”
“Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she we...”
“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. ”
“He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.”
“Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.”
“Dearest Cecilia, Youd be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I dont think I can blame the heat.”
“These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. a...”
“She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldnt let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.”
“When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, r...”
“A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no o...”
“Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?”
“At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.”
“The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single wo...”
“They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabri...”
“She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had tha...”
“In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.”
