The Salutation Quotes

“It is only for a week or two that a broken chair or a door off its hinges is recognised for such. Soon, imperceptibly, it changes its character, and becomes the chair which is always left in the corner, the door which does not shut. A pin, fastening a torn valance, rusts itself into the texture of the stuff, is irremovable; the cracked dessert place and the stewpan with a hole in it, set aside until the man who rivets and solders should chance to come that way, become part of the dresser, are taken down and dusted and put back, and when the man arrives no one remembers them as things in need of repair. Five large keys rest inside the best soup-tureen, scrupulously preserved though no one knows what it was they once opened, and the pastry-cutter is there too, little missed, for the teacup without a handle has taken its place.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Salutation

“Four thousand miles away, across a continent, across an ocean, was an island. And there, secure in the timelessness of all things irretrievably lost, was happiness—like a bird singing or a flower growing. He had possessed it, he had misused it—for to do anything with happiness but to receive it as the ear receives the song of a bird or the nostril the scent of a flower is to misuse it; he had left it. But because he had left it of his own will it had given him—a parting gift—this touchstone to carry forever in his heart, wherewith to try and infallibly dismiss any solace, whether by chance or plotted by the treachery of his desires, that might come to him and say, I too am happiness.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Salutation