More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Penelope was filled with sadness for her. Your children never stopped being children. Even when they were thirty-eight and successful career women. You could bear anything for yourself, but seeing your children hurt was unendurable.
She remembered the rain, driven in from the Atlantic on clouts of wind. She remembered her bedroom at Carn Cottage, lying in the darkness as she lay now, with the sound of waves breaking on the beach far below and the curtains stirring at the open windows and the beams of the lighthouse swinging their way across the white-painted walls. She remembered the garden, scented with escallonia, and the lane that led up onto the moor, and the view from the top, the spread of the bay, the brilliant blue of the sea. The sea was one of the reasons she wanted so much to go back. Gloucestershire was
...more
Alone, she was—in more ways than one—thrown back on her own resources. Self-reliance. That was the keyword, the one thing that could pull you through any crisis fate chose to hurl at you. To be yourself. Independent. Not witless. Still able to make my own decisions and plot the course of what remains of my
Not sad any longer. I lived with sadness for so long. And a loneliness that nothing and nobody could assuage. But, over the years, I came to terms with what had happened. I learned to live within myself, to grow flowers, to watch my children grow; to look at paintings and listen to music. The gentle powers. They are quite amazingly sustaining.”
The front door stood open, and smoke curled from a chimney. Mrs. Plackett was there, waiting for them. The kettle sang, and she had made a batch of scones. No home-coming could have been more welcome.
Happiness is making the most of what you have, and riches is making the most of what you’ve got. You have so much going for you. Why can’t you see that? Why do you always want more?”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about that. She may not have believed in God, but I’m pretty certain God believed in her.”
Perhaps you never completely grew up until your mother died.
