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SPOILER ALERT
Don't read this post if you aren't caught up.

"Harry: What did you want to do?
Draco: Quidditch. But I wasn't good enough. Mainly I wanted to be happy."

WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?!

"Harry, there is never a perfect answer in this messy, emotional world. Perfection is beyond the reach of mankind, beyond the reach of magic. In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again. Be honest to those you love, show your pain. To suffer is as human as to breathe."

I won't spoil who says this, but it's a doozy to read in that character's voice.

Goodness, I hope the prelude wasn't a good indication of what's to come. I'm fine with biographers approaching history with a literary bent, but for the love of everything, DON'T be a melodramatic prose stylist. I can't handle it.

Voltaire is a brat. Insufferable.

Enchanting.

The fact that Elizabeth refers to her husband as 'the Man of Wrath' (her caps) is more than a little unsettling.

'As I have not a living soul with whom to hold communion on [gardening] or indeed on any matter, my only way of learning is by making mistakes.'

My life in a nutshell.

'I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant--impossible socially, but full-scale--and that it's the knockings and batterings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banality.'

Something has to keep us interested in things besides the weather.

'he felt her knocking through him like another heart outside his own ribs.'

'Portia watched him watch; his eyes clung to people; their ignorance of what he had had to hear made his fellow hotel guests the picture of sanity. There are moments when one can comfort oneself by a look at the most callous faces--these have been innocent of at least one crime.'

My poor Brutt.

Portia's treatment of Brutt has been one of the most unnerving, infuriating experiences of my reading career. I haven't been this distraught by one character's treatment of another in years. My heart.

'there is a narrowness about fantasy: it figures only the voulu part of the self.'

There's no room for my uglier parts in fantasy.

'Anna thought: These days there's something dreadful about talk; people's convictions keep bobbing to the surface, making them flush. I'm sure it was better when people connected everything of that sort with religion, and did not talk about religion at meals.'

Heeh! I sometimes love Anna.

'She saw reflections of rain on the silver things on the tray. She felt blotted out from the room, as little present in it as these two others truly felt her to be.'

Lonely separateness and the weather.

'The most unlikely things one does, the most utterly out of character, arouse no curiosity, even in one's friends. One can suffer a convulsion of one's entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.'

'There seemed to be some way she did not know of by which people managed to understand each other.'

That horrible familiar unbearable thought.

'The water was animated: light ran off blades of oars or struck through the coloured or white sails that shivered passing the islands....Light struck into the islands' unvisited hearts; the silvery willow branches shifted apart to let light glitter through.'

I'm not over it.

'Not a thing had been tweaked from its flat, unfeeling position - palpably Anna had not been in here yet.'

I enjoy Thomas' extra sense for his wife's presence, as if the things she touches retain a trace of her aura.

What horrifies me most is everyone's treatment of Major Brutt. (Not brute, but brut. He is too lovely and sad.)

'She could not make up her mind to go out of doors, for she felt alone. If one is to walk alone, it should be with pleasant thoughts.'

My heart.

Heartbreaking surely fleeting moment of clarity:

'Something awful will happen. I cannot feel what you feel: I'm shut up in myself. All I know is, you've been so sweet. It's no use holding on to me, I shall only drown you. Portia, you don't know what you are doing.'

You can guess how much good it does to tell a fifteen year old she doesn't know what she's doing.

'I do know.'

Mhmm.

In the midst of a few dozen intense, emotionally crippling pages of gaslighting and horrible behavior, we get this quick little charming exchange:

'What did Daphne mean about ideas I hadn't got?'
'Her own, I should think.'

Too bad Eddie returns immediately to another dose of gaslighting.

'The empty lodging house rustled with sea noises, as though years of echoes of waves and sea sucking shingle lived in its chimneys, its half open cupboards.'

Just enchanted, that's all. (Me, I mean.)

'The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.'

This.

'Pity the selfish lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.'

Good grief.

'Life militates against the seclusion we seek. In the chaos that suddenly thrusts in, nothing remains unreal, except possibly love. Then, love only remains as a widened susceptibility: it is felt at the price of feeling all human dangers and pains. The lover becomes the sentient figurehead of the whole human ship, thrust forward by the weight of the race behind him through pitiless elements...(cont.)'

'This was to be her first party. Tonight, the ceiling rose higher, the lounge extended tense and mysterious.'

Bowen's use of personification from Portia's perspective is my absolute favorite thing.

'In the first great phase of love, which with very young people lasts a long time, the beloved is not outside one, so neither comes nor goes. In this dumb, exalted and exalting confusion, what actually happens plays very little part.'

An excerpt of the encyclopedic description of 'Twitterpation.'

'she slept voraciously'

Oh goodness! Story of my life.

'Inside everyone, is there an anxious person who stands to hesitate in an empty room?'

It's comforting to believe so.