P 48 Quotes

“I understood now the disgust in my father's eye. His moron son, confessing all. I recalled how his jaw had hardened as I spoke. He does not deserve to be king.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“It was not murder that exiled me, it was my lack of cunning.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Comme le travail ne présente aucune nécessité, sauf pour ceux dont il renforce le pouvoir, des travailleurs toujours plus nombreux passent d'une activité relativement utile à une activité relativement inutile, dans le simple but d'assurer le maintien de l'ordre, la paix sociale - car le travail est en soi la plus redoutable des polices.”
― Bob Black, Travailler, moi ? Jamais !

“By the time we reached the village, I’d blisters on my palms from my suitcase handle. Perhaps Mum had been right about those extra books, after all. I was ravenous too, and wondered what Queenie might’ve made for our supper. It was hard to see anything of Budmouth Point itself. The dark felt even thicker than the blackout in London, though I could just about make out the outline of houses on either side of the road.”
― Emma Carroll, Letters from the Lighthouse

“Cliff squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back just to let him know I was there.
Then I saw light. Not from Mrs. Henderson’s torch; this was something bigger, out beyond the houses. It wasn’t constant like the searchlights over London, but every few moments sent out a beam so strong that in it I glimpsed the grey water and white-topped waves of what had to be the sea. My heart gave a little skip.
‘That’s the lighthouse,’ said Miss Carter, who appeared beside me. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it? A beacon to guide the lost to safety.’
It was beautiful. I’d never seen a real working lighthouse before. The way its light reached far out into the darkness was mesmerising to watch.
Miss Carter sighed. ‘There’s talk of turning it off now, though. It’s a threat to national security, apparently, because the enemy’s been using landmarks like this to navigate their planes.’
‘When they come over to bomb us, you mean?’ I’d heard something similar back in London, about German pilots following the Thames to find their targets.
‘Exactly that.’
This war, I thought bleakly. This horrid, horrid war. Even down here in the wilds of Devon we couldn’t escape it.”
― Emma Carroll, Letters from the Lighthouse

“Absurdities exasperated her. At the same time, the slow process of patiently leading recalcitrant thinkers to better thoughts by artful persuasions seemed to her a waste of time--a logical argument, cogently expressed, was surely sufficient to convince, and if it did not convince, then the case might well be hopeless and not worth pursuing.”
― Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA