96 quotes found
“She had one of those husky voices that sounded as if she were permanently coming down with a cold. Men seemed to find that sexy in a woman, which Jackson thought was odd because it made women sound...”
“It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.”
“They were lucky. They'd been given history.”
“Amelia envisaged that between York and the royal-infested Scottish Highlands there was a grimy wasteland of derelict cranes and abandoned mills and betrayed, yet still staunch, people. Oh and moorl...”
“The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree......The clo...”
“The mind is a fathomless mystery.”
“Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was - wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there w...”
“Pamela produced placid babies. "They don't tend to turn feral until they're two," she said.”
“And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!”
“Her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take the place. What that 'something' was she had no idea.”
“Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.”
“Popular versus literary—a false divide?”
“She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.”
“What would I put in my bottom drawer? – I would put only sharp objects, the clean lines of broken glass, the honed steel of paring knives, the tiny saw-teeth of bread knives and the soothing edges ...”
“All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.And this one is Teddy's.”
“Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragi...”
“Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness”
“Oh, man, ‘the nursery,’ ” Dominic said, “what a hell-hole. If I had kids I’d give them the nicest room in the house.”“You do have kids,” his kid said.“Oh, yeah, well, right, you know what I mean.”
“You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.”
“If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus.”
