منال

“I’ve always suspected that a sense of humour is a kind of parlour trick we civilized folk have taught ourselves as an insurance against disillusionment.”
― Mary Westmacott, The Rose and the Yew Tree: A Historical Novel of Suspense and Romance

“She should have known.

If you loved people you should know about them.

You didn't know because it was so much easier to believe the pleasant, easy things that you would like to be true, and not distress yourself with the things that really were true.”
― Mary Westmacott, Absent in the Spring

“What is the real truth of a human creature who can appear so differently to different people?'
Robert, who seldom joined in our conversations, moved restlessly and said rather unexpectedly:
'But isn't that just the point? People do appear differently to different people. So do things. Trees, for instance, or the sea. Two painters would give you an entirely different idea of St Loo harbour.'
'You mean one painter would paint it naturalistically and another symbolically?'
Robert shook his head rather wearily. He hated talking about painting. He never could find the words to express what he meant.
'No,' he said. 'They'd actually see it differently. Probably—I don't know—you pick out of everything the things in it which are significant to you.”
― Mary Westmacott, The Rose and the Yew Tree

“That was why she had had to come here, to the desert. This clear, terrible light would show her what she was. Would show her the truth of all the things she hadn't wanted to look at—the things that, really, she had known all along.”
― Mary Westmacott, Absent in the Spring