A Dark-Adapted Eye Quotes

“I lived in the present. That’s supposed to be a good thing, you know, an ideal, according to modern psychology. Odd, because the truth is, one lives in the present when the past is too bad to remember and the future too dreadful to contemplate.”
― Barbara Vine, A Dark-Adapted Eye

“Secretiveness was an important feature in Longley family culture, even when there was no real reason for it. Information was not given and news was not told. One was expected to know it already or not to wish to know it.”
― Barbara Vine, A Dark-Adapted Eye

“There is a Jewish joke concerning the man who says of an enemy: Why does he hate me so? I never did him any good.”
― Barbara Vine, A Dark-Adapted Eye

“Helen has reached an age when life itself has become fragile, when each day must be an only half-expected gift, when she knows there can be no future to talk about.”
― Barbara Vine, A Dark-Adapted Eye

“That family’s mutual love had not usually found its expression in outward show. In other words, there had not been embraces. The twins, for instance, did not kiss each other, though the women pecked the air around each other’s faces. It”
― Barbara Vine, A Dark-Adapted Eye

“The hands of the watch stood at five past eight. The only kind of death that can be accurately predicted to the minute had taken place, the death that takes its victim, … feet foremost through the floor, Into an empty space. 2 THREE TIMES IN THE past thirty-five years I had seen her name in print.”
― Barbara Vine, A Dark-Adapted Eye