From when she was a baby, Tom has taught the girl to respect, but not fear, the forces of nature- the lightning that might strike the light tower on Janus, the oceans that batter the island.
Your family’s never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.
We can’t rightly ever talk about the future, if you think about it. We can only talk about what we imagine or wish for. It’s not the same thing.
If the war had taught her anything, it was to take nothing for granted: that it wasn’t safe to put off what mattered. Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back.
Life,’ thought Septimus, … ‘you could never trust the bastard. What it gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.
Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.
You have only to forgive once. To resent, you have to doit all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things” Frank to Hannah Roennfeldt
He was a practical man: give him a sensitive technical instrument, and he could maintain it; something broken, and he could mend it, meditatively, efficiently. But confronted by his grieving wife, he felt useless.
The only thing we can do is love that little girl as much as she deserves. And never, never hurt her!
What are you suggesting I do Ralph?’‘I’m suggesting you tell the bloody truth whatever it is. The only place lying leads is trouble.’“Sometimes that’s the only place telling the truth get you, too.
Stick to now. Put right the things you can put right today, and let the ones from back then go. Leave the rest to the angels, or the devil or whoever’s in charge of it.
Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back. She began to feel an urgency, a need to seize an opportunity. Before anyone else did.
Such a mysterious business, motherhood. How brave a woman must be to embark on it.
Sometimes, you’re the one who strikes it lucky. Sometimes, it’s the other poor bastard who’s left with the short straw, and you just have to shut up and get on with it.
Christ–the quickest way to send a bloke mad is to let him go on re-fighting his war till he gets it right.
I shouldn’t have spoken like that.”People do, sometimes. People who’ve had less to contend with than you. We’re not always in full control of our actions.
Other blokes might take advantage, but to Tom, the idea of honor was a kind of antidote to some of the things he’d lived through.
Being over there changes a man. Right and wrong don’t look so different anymore to some.
That’s how life goes on – protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame.
It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.
Then he remembered Ralph’s words–“no point in fighting your war over and over until you get it right.
The oceans never stop. They know no beginning or end. The wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island, to make a point which is lost on Tom.
This focusing outward…painful as it was, saved her from a more intolerable examination.