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“Very well. Be firm, give no liberties, and do not underestimate the importance of the child forming his letters properly. As the hand, the mind.”
They were only human, even if they hadn’t yet made the effort to become tall.
It turned out that the only difference between children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad.
“Of course not. Most people’s work is nonsense at the best of times, don’t you think? Actuaries and loss adjusters and professors of Eggy-peggy. Most of them would be more useful reciting limericks and stuffing their socks with glitter.”
It took skill, at twenty-three, to be sad. The trouble was, he noticed things that made one melancholy.
In the hallway the familiar air of the house closed around her—the beeswax on the banisters and the Brasso that burnished the stair rods. A hint of laundry on the boil. Somewhere far within, crockery clacked as a maid addressed the detritus of afternoon tea. Coal rumbled as it was decanted from scuttle to purdonium.
the war had cut the thin cord that bound each child to its ancestors with links made from cross-stitch and calligraphy.
To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before. It was to know that if one were ever alone again, there would be no exemption from the agony of it. It wasn’t the happiest feeling.
So long as a thing was not perfectly simple to learn, the boy was good at it.
why should one expect to feel the same every day, in a world that was rearranging itself by the hour?
“Look, old man, it’s war. There isn’t a pill. Find a sweet girl and forget it.”
One could always imagine that one’s life, though smoldering in parts, might be undamaged in the west.
How perfect that a savior had come to earth who could heal and forgive, but that what everyone sang about was the local guesthouse being full.
“No, I’m afraid you will have to run it past me again,” said Alistair, nudging the tiller with his toe. “There’s a man called . . . ?” “Something Hitler,” said Simonson. “Axel? Albrecht? German chap.” “And he wants . . . ?” “To take over the running of the world.” “What, all of it?” “So it is rumored.” Alistair frowned. “With all its tedious responsibilities along with the evident perks?” “One imagines the fellow has weighed it up and decided to press on regardless.” “Has he considered how vexatious it would be to find oneself in charge of us? Or how independent-minded the Americans are? I
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People spoke in whispers, as if the war were listening.
And this was when her stomach fell and she understood that the problem was a perceptual one: that her concussion was worse than she had supposed, that she was hallucinating.
It was the genius of motivated men that even when rendered impotent by conditions of total encirclement, they could make themselves preternaturally shiny.
London had fitted her so perfectly that she had mistaken its shape for her own.
When there was nothing left to shine, there were walls of sandbags to be moved. It was discovered by the officers of the regiment, with their three batteries in eight-hour rotation, that if the men of the first battery moved a sandbag wall from A to B, the second from B to A and the third from A to B again, then the first battery would come back on duty satisfied that their work was still as they had left it.
was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season.
War made one do everything when one wasn’t at all ready. Dying, yes, but also living.
One felt nothing at all from the dead. They died, and then they were gone, and one’s heart ached from the sudden absence of feeling more than from any surfeit.
To begin life the first time had been a breeze. Being so newly fledged, one had only to step off the bough and be astonished by the sudden rush of air.
One had to take off from the ground. Every wing beat had to be forced against an unsympathetic gravity.
Perhaps this was what it was to grow up: this realization that the world was already staffed with people and that one was not particularly needed.
“I don’t feel as if I’m for anything anymore, that’s the trouble. I used to know straight away what was the right thing to do.”
Tens of thousands were dead now, and everyone left was sickened. This was something about war that they did not warn one of: that death was an illness of the living, a cumulative poison.
“Your father was my choice. You were my delight. You may despise my life for its smallness—it may seem as nothing to you—but please do not think it is nothing to me.
“What a shame,” said Mary, wondering if Hilda was dead too and then realizing that of course she couldn’t be, since here she was now. It was hard to keep up with who was and who wasn’t.
Hilda watched herself in the mirror. Softly at first and then rising to a piercing scream, the kettle finally boiled.
hard to balance without his arm. One had never realized how quietly an arm just got on with the business of equilibrium—counterbalancing here, giving a little nudge there. One hadn’t suspected that life was a circus trick, requiring exquisite balance and grace.
“Women fall differently, that’s all. We die by the stopping of our hearts, they by the insistence of theirs.”
It was queer the way things crept: the night, and these feelings. One was brought up to scorn the tendency to despair. But it seemed that the darkness knew this, and found a way to reach one nevertheless. It was patient and subtle, gauging the heart’s output of light. Her confusion grew, the heart lucent and the mind lucifugous, the great clash of music in an endlessly accelerating rush: on and on and on.
“You are a dear girl. If you weren’t impossible I shouldn’t love you half so much. You’re what I might have been if I’d ever had the courage to tell my mother to mind her own business.”
“You must choose a husband carefully, you see, because his ideals must stand in for yours. Ideals will become ambitions, and ambitions need allies, and allies require soirées and galas and seating plans.” “You don’t think it will be different between men and women after this war? You don’t feel we are on the cusp of something?” “We should make a tapestry of the cusps we’ve been on.”
The young see the world that they wish for. The old see the world as it is. You must tell me which you think the more honest.”
believably on the page. That’s what a novelist is: I’m not a creating god, I’m reality’s jailor. Your descriptions of London during the blitz are incredibly vivid. What kind of research did you conduct to get those scenes right? I did something louche and unfashionable: I talked with older people. I belong to the last generation of writers who can listen to elders who lived through WWII, either on the home front or as prisoners or combatants. I felt that it was important to listen to them while they were still with us to tell the tale. Everything else, I could—and did—research in libraries and
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