DeanJean

“All the golden guineas had gone now and we only had the little I earned as a model. With this we had to pay for food, light and heat, and laundry and of course rent. Sometimes we were several weeks behind and the landlady would ask us for money each time we went in or out of the house. I would hear her talking about us to the other people who lived on the floor below and felt dreadfully ashamed.

Charles did not mind. He just said she was a silly old bitch. As soon as Charles started to paint he forgot about the cold and money worries. That is how artists should be, but I was only a commercial artist, so I went on worrying.”
― Barbara Comyns, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

“Not much is truly holy in this world, but precious is the person who does not pass on the pain and the desire for retribution, that self-sustaining spiral; who says, “No more,” not out of resignation or defeat, but out of something that might be called love, if it even needs a name.

It became clear to me now what my father had given me. He had broken the cycle.”
― Darran Anderson, Inventory: A Memoir

“Eva was rather impressed that we had made all the necessary arrangements. I did not tell her that I would shortly be leaving my job, because already she had said that penniless people had no right to have children. She didn’t seem to think it was Charles’s baby — only mine, because later on, when I was upstairs putting on my coat, she kissed me quite kindly, but spoilt it by saying, ‘I shall never forgive you, Sophia, for making my son a father at twenty-one.’ I almost added, ‘And you a grandmother at forty-six.”
― Barbara Comyns, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

“Sinden desired something in her which she hardly even knew that she possessed. Only yesterday she had been an irrevelant child; how amazing to find herself now at life's core, the object of such brusque, blind, heedless, hungry pursuit, as if nothing else in the world mattered.”
― Tessa Hadley, The Party