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She said that childhood was a frightening time and that hearing scary stories was a way of feeling less alone.
Which is how I learned that while I could not be in two places at once, I could most certainly be in one place at two times.
The point is that no matter what evil might come one’s way, to be loved is to be protected.”
Nothing in life had had the power to frighten him, because he knew how much I loved him.”
“She used to say that the human heartbeat was the first music that a person heard, and that every child was born knowing the rhythm of her mother’s song.”
wanted
“Life is long” was all he’d said, his voice calm; he hadn’t looked up from the film. “Being human isn’t easy.”
for people do not change. They remain, as they age, the people that they were when they were young, only frailer and sadder.
Such an almighty transfer of energy and matter must surely have affected the world’s balance at an essential—an elemental—level: all of those people who had once been, suddenly gone.
“Don’t slide down the rabbit hole,” the Alan in her mind said cheerily. “The way down’s a breeze, but climbing back’s a battle.”
Experiencing the world at one remove, through the windows of their phones, making images for later so that they do not need to bother seeing or feeling things now.
What hubris it was, he said, that mankind should think to halve the powers of the human race by ignoring the minds and words of the female half of it.)
Places that lent thread to the weave of this novel include Avebury Manor, Kelmscott Manor, Great Chalfield Manor, Abbey House Gardens in Malmesbury, Lacock Abbey, the Uffington White Horse, the Barbury Hill Fort, the Ridgeway, the countryside of Wiltshire, Berkshire, and Oxfordshire, the villages of Southrop, Eastleach, Kelmscott, Buscot, and Lechlade, the river Thames, and of course London.
Should you wish to visit a house with genuine priest holes, Harvington Hall in Worcestershire retains seven designed by Saint Nicholas Owen. It also sits upon a moated island.
