The Clockmaker's Daughter

by Kate Morton

he dealt with his disappointment, with his hardship and grief; he picked himself up and went on, every time. And not like a mad person who refuses to recognize adversity, but like someone who accepts that life is inherently unfair. That the only truly fair thing about it is the randomness of its unfairness.”

Leonard despised money. That is, he despised the quest to possess it. In his view, the only positive to be drawn from the war was the realization of how little a man actually needed to survive. How little the rest of it mattered. All of those abandoned grandfather clocks; people who simply closed the doors on their mansions and fled with their families in search of safety.

without the darkness one would never notice the stars.

(Edward, of course, said the opposite. He said that she had a good brain and that it was important she should use it. 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.)