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But real change is often only seen in hindsight.
because here the people were, in a phrase she had read in a Russian novel, great-souled.
which gave her the appearance of a small bolt of the cloth, with, at halfway, the one heroic button.
When he eventually entered, it was always with a sense of finding the world in its underpants.
The moment undid gloom, for in it was the substance of everyday, the small and ordinary which, against catastrophe, is discovered marvellous.
Changing your mind is one of the most difficult feats of the living.
the baby in her arms in the deep sleep that is like a linen without stain.
what a beautiful simile
‘We do not get to live only the best parts of life.
Work was a habit invented to stop the mind from going elsewhere,
From long acquaintance with calamity, the doctor’s face had mastered impassivity. He could be told of any disaster or tragedy and in the lineaments and planes of flesh and
bone there would appear no register. Hold fire was his father’s precis for a profession that required you to be human and not, and a manner that did not flinch when the enemy was right in front of you.
He looked like he had lain all night on conundrums,
the doctor found himself succumbing to the gaiety of grandfathers who know they did so much wrong as a father the first time, and who, from an appreciation not too late of the shortness of life, let the rules fall away, coming instead under the governance of the tiny hand clutching their forefinger.
only saints can see beyond their own suffering,
He felt the shepherd’s burden of a pastoral care for a flock that jumped the walls.
In front of the fire was not McCarthy, but Young McCarthy, a two-dimensional youth who had not said goodbye to pimples before he said hello to cigarettes.
The compassion that had flowed out of him every day for decades in that house and district, the love he had given and the suffering he had felt, had a limit, and he had arrived at it now, and did not have the energy to argue or explain.
