I mean what else is there for a woman to do if she doesn’t want to go from the parental to the marital home with nothing in between? ‘An educated woman,’Millie amended. ‘An educated woman,’ Ursula agreed.
Pam wasn’t what Gloria would have called a friend, just someone she had known for so long that she had given up trying to get rid of her.
Get down,’ Bunty says grimly. ‘Mummy’s thinking.’ (Although what Mummy’s actually doing is wondering what it would be like if her entire family was wiped out and she could start again.)
Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.
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.
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 was nothing beyond the mind?
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.
But I know nothing; my future is a wide-open vista, leading to an unknown country – The Rest Of My Life.
Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.
She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.
In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.
The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.
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.
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.
…and no man gave you a fur coat without expecting to receive something inreturn. Except for one’s husband, of course, who expected nothing beyond modest gratitude.
If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus.
… Angus had a “pretty normal childhood.” Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.
Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing–getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?…Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements.
was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets?
Secrets had the power to kill a marriage,she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said,it was secrets that could save a marriage.
If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn’t mind being their mother.
She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn’t even have the strength to feel guilty.
Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him.
Maybe this was why people filled their house with stinking cats, so they didn’t notice that they were alone, so they wouldn’t die without a living soul noticing.
The only time you were safe was when you were dead.
What does it matter what people do? At the end of the day we’re all dead.
How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him, Ursula wondered?
They said love made you strong, but in Louise’s opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn’t get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.
Life wasn’t about becoming, was it? It was about being.
And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If hell did exist, which Jackson was sure it did, it would be governed by a committee of fifteen-year-old Italian boys on bikes.
She had married him in order to be safe from the chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.
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 we are safely in the futu