Life took longer to reassemble than it did to blow apart, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be lovely, providing that one remembered to go for country walks, and to tune the wireless to music.
One could always imagine that one’s life, though smoldering in parts, might be undamaged in the west.
In my world death will come chasing. In your world it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself. I know this because it started whispering to me when I was in the detention center.
But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?
They spoke of small things at first, since it was best, when reattaching threads, to begin with the easiest knots.
People spoke in whispers, as if the war was listening
She knew, now, why her father had not spoken of the last war, nor Alistair of his. It was hardly fair on the living.
I suppose we ought to be getting home, in any case.”“Oh god, is it wartime already?”“Look on the bright side: it’ll be dinner when we get back.
The first problem of war was that no one was any good at it yet.
Her mother set to with the hairbrush again. “But would that be so awful, darling? To be the prettiest thing in Brimscombe-and-Thrupp?”“I should rather die.”“You nearly did.”“Yes, but I tend to blame the Germans.
Then I’m tempted to die just to … spite him.”“That’s the spirit that will win us the war.
There in the sweet sacking smell of the mail bags he understood that he was dying, and it pleased him that he was going in the company of so many soft words home.
Everything can be restored. If one won’t believe that, how does one endure all this?
This helpful war. It makes us better people and then it tries to kill us.
I move we get more wine,’ Alistair said. ‘What does the panel think?’…It was obvious that the entire war could be solved in this way. The trick would be to reach for a corkscrew instead, every time some brass hat ordered artillery.
on a bike ride through the Surrey Lanes, pedalling in my cotton dress through the hot fields blushing with poppies, freewheeling down a sudden dip into a cool wooded sanctum.
You are a mousetrap of a friend, all soft cheese and hard springs
I want to be a journalist again. I want to make a difference in the world.
What is the good of influence if one can only use it on strangers?
Murder me with bombs you poor lonely sod I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself.
The true moments of one’s life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronized with the ordinary: with rail timetables, with breaks in traffic.
There are countries of the world, and regions of one’s own mind, where it is unwise to travel.
For me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it. It is not an illness you can cure yourself of by standing up and letting the big red cinema seat fold itself up behind you.
Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.
Putting down the power right from the whistle would be ugly and brutal, but it would get the job done. He wanted to tell her that, but this was the thing with coaching: you had to step back at exactly the moment you ached to step forward.
I did not want to tell her what happened, but I had to now. I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
I understand that your brain is large and perpetually at war with itself
I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
He really had experienced every tiniest increment of time in the four decades since then, and yet here he was surprised to be suddenly old and crippled. Turned out the rope didn’t care if you noticed every daisy on the path to the gallows.
When death comes you do not stay for one minute in the place it has visited. Many things arrive after death-sadness, questions, and policemen- and none of these can be answered when your papers are not in order.
Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
…disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself by hardly moving its lips…
When you make a man ashamed, you make him dangerous.
We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.
How well it had suited me, that absolute license to march up to evildoers and demand who, what, where, when and why?