The House on Vesper Sands Quotes

“A degree of suspicion is always warranted, Bliss. I wake up in the morning with a degree of suspicion. I look at you with a degree of suspicion, God knows.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“There was the plenitude of this midsummer dusk, exalting all that was ordinary. It seemed impossible, even as it faded, to imagine that it was anything other than eternal.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“You may say it, Georgie, and no one would blame you. You may say that you told me so, that he and his kind were not to be trusted. But I thought I knew better. I thought I could make my way in their world even if I didn’t truly belong to it. I thought it was enough to be clever, Georgie, and to make a secret of all I truly cared for. I thought it was enough.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“Fate is a fairy tale, my darling. In life, there is only opportunity and advantage.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“It means, Bliss, that she is passing from the world. She is slipping away from herself, as we do in our dotage, leaving only what we remember from the first – songs and rhymes, and what have you. But her mind is not gone, as a dotard’s is. It is elsewhere. She is passing from the world, but she has some business in it still. People talk of fearing ghosts, but it is not ghosts they should be afraid of. It is the likes of this poor creature.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“Safe?’ Miss Tatton glanced at him, but kept up her pace. ‘Ain’t much that’s safe, young master, when a girl must work for a living.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“She had served for some years in the Salvation Army, she said, but had come to the view that while soup and soap were well and good, salvation might just as easily be done without.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“When you speak to all sorts, you hear all sorts.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“There was this light, if nothing else, and a sense that it was sufficient. There was the plenitude of this midsummer dusk, exalting all that was ordinary. It seemed impossible, even as it faded, to imagine that it was anything other than eternal.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“do. I know you. All your deceit, all your lies. Did you think you were so very brilliant? I may not have known what you were hiding, but I knew you were always hiding something. Always. And there were things you couldn’t hide. The emptiness at the core of you. You couldn’t hide it because you didn’t recognise it. But I did. It’s why I refused you.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“Of course, I’d had to put the hours in first, telling you just enough to keep you keen. I’d had to cultivate you, as one always does with rare blooms, but my efforts were rewarded in the end.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“She destroyed the vessels, you know, when she jumped. And the resin that was left. A fucking seamstress, of all things.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“How inconvenient for the Gowdens, he said. But I suppose it won’t be terribly difficult to find another serving girl. One is much like another, after all.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“He was a monster always, and filled with jealousy, but my father restrained him. Once he was gone, well …”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“I am among friends. Lady Ada is speaking of an interior brightness, a brightness of the soul, though perhaps we use the Christian word in ignorance. There is more I must tell you, but first, if I may – Lady Ada, did you feel compelled to keep it hidden, this perception?”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“He has a weakness for certain exotic cases, you see, and his methods tend towards the unorthodox. Still, even Cutter is not given free rein. Indeed, I have it on good authority that until this morning he was on the point of being called in for a talking-to.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“I’m not an imbecile, Elf. You brought me to Strythe House because there were things you wanted me to see. Did you expect me to notice only what you wanted?’ ‘Touché,’ he said. He had taken his gloves off and clutched them now against his chest. ‘I’m afraid I rather deserved that.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“Nothing had changed, or nothing that he could name, but his conviction persisted. Some subtle transfiguration had occurred. It was in the stillness of the air, in the spill of cold light at the doorway.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“Is that how you mean to help me? By saving me the trouble of finding Lord Strythe? Are you going to produce him triumphantly and take a bow? Is that why we’re here?”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“I have known rather more unpleasantness than you may credit,’ she said. ‘I will thank you to proceed, and no more of this mimsy circumlocution.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“You are right there, Mrs Cornish,’ Cutter said. ‘I am not going to tell you.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“She was devoted to spiritualism of all kinds, which was hardly unusual in itself, but her considerable wealth – amassed by her late husband in the manufacture of medicinal tar soaps – allowed her to indulge her passion on a far grander scale than most.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“This man is no better than a charlatan, sir. He exhibits her as if she were some curiosity at a fairground. Surely there is a statute prohibiting such malpractice.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“This institution is a place for the sick, for women and their general and particular ailments. We are far from richly endowed, but we do our utmost. There are limits, however, to what modern medicine may accomplish.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“You’re not like him, young master. You’re not your uncle, and I like it better when you don’t pretend to be. You were put on this earth for other things. For better things. Ain’t that so?”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“You cannot report a stranger missing, you empty-headed Canary-bird. For all you know, Bliss, the same girl creeps into that church every night of the week to be out of the cold, but has the good sense to creep out in the mornings before anyone is stirring.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“Why would you want to keep up such a thing, when it will mean trotting after me into every foul lane and tenement in London – for it is not all grand tragedies in Mayfair, I assure you – and enduring my temper day and night.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“Lord Strythe was a man of considerable standing and powerful connections, yet there seemed to be almost no one who knew him directly.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“One can’t very well write about society if one never ventures into it.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands

“Like George Eliot, Paraic O’Donnell takes the bombastic and the sincere and throws them together for comic contrast; like Dickens, he does it in deliciously dark Victorian style.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands