This Real Night (Aubrey Trilogy, #2)

by Rebecca West

‘When things go well,’ he said apologetically to Mamma, ‘one cannot help feeling cheerful.’ ‘Why not?’ said Mamma. He hesitated. ‘Surely it’s a kind of treachery’, he said, ‘to all the things that haven’t gone well.’

Was I sometimes savage? I was under the impression that I was mild, though often people were savage to me.

‘It is not only the question of whether people can help doing what they do,’ said Mamma. ‘One must be kind to them whatever they do, when things have gone wrong that is the only way of getting them right.’

Mamma regarded her with the pity she always extended to people under a special handicap,

It’s time somebody put the shutters up on this nonsense business. It’s all over the place. Granted the man who said this thing is the one to blame, what’s this newspaper doing, not letting the thing lie where it dropped, and putting it in at the end of the column where you’re bound to read it, if you care for interesting things.

men find a special pleasure in rejecting women, and will contrive to do it even to women who have not been offered to them.

My mind is on a train that is going out of the station and leaving my body on the platform.’

The occasion was the annulment of life, for what is life but being able to move according to the will?

‘I want to live. Oh, God, how I want to live.’ She answered, speaking bitterly, as I had never heard her speak before, ‘No. Not to live. To live happily.’

Men were like this, moody, unjust, showing their perturbation at misfortune by adding to it; all men but Richard Quin, who had left us.

‘Why do they make such a fuss about murder when ordinary death is so terrible?’