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Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.
They were the kind of clothes that might turn you into someone else.
Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.
Every morning she woke up and thought, not tonight, I won’t take a drink tonight, and every afternoon the longing built as she imagined walking into her apartment at the end of the day and being greeted by oblivion.
Back at the beginning of the Blitz they would have said, “They can’t come every night,” now they knew they could.
Like Hugh, he had lived through the trenches and claimed that he was impervious to threats from Jerry. There was a whole club of them, Crighton, Ralph, Mr. Miller, even Hugh, who had undergone their ordeal by fire and mud and water and who presumed it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
How sorry she felt for herself, as if she were someone else.
How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him?
sand, after all, was the future of rocks.
(Could London be erased, like Knossos or Pompeii? The Cretans and the Romans probably went around saying, “We can take it,” in the heart of disaster.)
Miss Woolf believed in the war but her religious faith had begun to “crumble” since the start of the bombing. “Yet we must hold fast to what is good and true. But it all seems so random. One wonders about the divine plan and so on.”
It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.
It was a rather bald message and he should perhaps have spent the extra money on some mitigating adverbs.
Maurice shrugged and said, “May as well, but girls can’t shoot, it’s a well-known fact.” “Girls are absolutely useless,” Ursula agreed. “They can’t do anything.” “Are you being sarcastic?” “Me?”
But, ye gods, it was boring. So much hot air rising above the tables in Café Heck or the Osteria Bavaria, like smoke from the ovens. It was difficult to believe from this perspective that Hitler was going to lay waste to the world in a few years’ time.
no news in the dark of the night was ever good.
