Hope, how she had grown to hate the word. It was an insideious seed planted inside a person’s soul, surviving covertly on little tending, then flowering so spectacularly that none could help but cherish it.
Because desperate people cling to hope like sailors to their wreaks.
It’ll be a change,” says Marcus. “Something different.””Not a mystery.”Marcus laughs. “No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history.”Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.
I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested–intrigued even–by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.
But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960’s.
My fingers positively itched to drift at length along their spines, to arrive at one whose lure I could not pass, to pluck it down, to inch it open, then to close my eyes and inhale the soul-sparking scent of old and literate dust.
She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.
Nature is cruel. Isn’t that right, Daddy? Every living thing has to die. And they’re still beautiful. Now they’ll stay that way.
What she really felt like doing was reading. Escaping into the Enchanted Wood, up the Faraway Tree, or with the Famous Five into Smuggler’s Top.
Those afternoons in the library, breathing the stale sun-warmed dust of a thousand stories (accented by the collective mildew of a hundred years of rising damp), had been enchanted.
Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so – to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!
That was the nature of history, of course: notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors.
History in the storyteller’s hand was a potent force indeed,….
To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn’t hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.
They were young; time hadn’t yet rubbed at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions…
…home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children. But whether tomorrow or years from now, I cannot guess.
Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?
You make a life out of what you have, not what you’re missing.
How was a boy who’d tasted poverty ever expected to choose the poorer road?
I had forgotten, I suppose, that there were bright memories in amongst the dark.
As if I hadn’t spent a lifetime pretending to forget.
His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.
There was some part of me that never left that house. Rather, some part of the house that wouldn’t leave me.
Alice felt a surge of pity for them, stuck as they were within the white-hot glow of youth, when everything seemed so vital, so essential, so important.
This was the power of the story weaver, Nell realized. An ability to conjure color so that all else seemed to fade.
Vivien thought how ugly adults could be, how weak. So used to getting what they wanted that they didn’t know the first thing about being brave.
You’ll beat this. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you will. You’re a survivor.””I don’t want to survive it.””I know that, too,” Nell had said. “And it’s fair enough. But sometimes we don’t have a choice…
The happiest folks are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe. -The Crone’s Eyes
Mrs. Bird smiled at me as I arrived at her side. “They can surprise us, can’t they, our parents? The things they got up to before we were born.””Yes,” I said. “Almost like they were real people once.
That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.
Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing [as a nice safe history].
Tragedy has been described as ‘the conflict between desire and possibility.’ Following this definition, is The Forgotten Garden a tragedy? If so, in what way/s?
it was enough just to free the words so that the voices in her head were stilled.
Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.
Loneliness had made the Queen bitter, bitterness had made her selfish, and selfishness had made her suspicious. –The Changeling
And I knew then that there would be no telling me what he saw. I understand somehow that certain images, certain sounds, could not be shared and could not be lost.
Give someone more time and they’ll appear to have done more with it.
The world was an awfully large place and it wasn’t easy to find a person who’d gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.