To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.
And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.
And she thought then how strange it was that disaster—the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face—could be at times, such a thing of beauty.
The view, though. The view. It is undeniably exhilarating.
Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.
You have to do what your heart dictates,” Vivian says. “Do you believe that?””Not sure, actually. It’s always annoyingly inconvenient, isn’t it, the thing about the heart?
A person walks into a room and says hello, and your life takes a course for which you are not prepared. It’s a tiny moment (almost-but not quite-unremarkable), the beginning of a hundred thousand tiny moments and some larger ones.
Olympia thinks often about desire – desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence – and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul.
Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true.
Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.
Everyday, there are choices to make and sometimes you make a selfish one.
I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.
One day a man has a job, and life is full of possibilities. The next day the job and the car are gone, and the man cannot look his wife in the eye.
Night would settle in like slow blindness, sucking the color from the trees and the low sky and the rocks and the frozen grass and the frost white hydrangeas until there was nothing left in the window but her own reflection.
And this all causes her to wonder at the disparity between the silk dresses and the natural postures of the body, and to think: How far, HOW FAR, we are willing to go to pretend we are not of the body at all.
And though her husband will appear to come alive, she knows that it is lust – too quickly ignited and too quickly extinguished – that animates him.
That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love.
A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house.