Visitors Quotes

“Had she been more active, less reclusive, she would have gone out into the streets to lose herself in some sort of company, have made the pretext of buying an evening paper an opportunity to chat to the newsagent, but she rejected such stratagems, seeing them for what they were. It had been decreed that she was to be solitary, and somehow she had always known this. Once she had left her parents’ house all friendships had seemed provisional; even marriage had not changed that.”
― Anita Brookner, Visitors

“But books, she had found, were too powerful, and invariably misleading.”
― Anita Brookner, Visitors

“This was his main therapeutic tool: his conviction, invariably imparted to the patient, that his services were not really required.”
― Anita Brookner, Visitors

“She was aware, as perhaps never before, that alternative deaths might be available, that one might progress to a cheerful and inconvenient old age somewhere in the sun, instead of putting up with that resigned half light. Old people in the south, good wine assisting, relied more on being obstreperous than on being polite. She had seen ancient women in Italy, in Spain, in Greece, their legs bowed, their faces deeply wrinkled, rocking along sun-struck streets with a sort of gaiety, raising their sticks in greeting, laughing at babies in their new innocence, babies themselves in the immediacy of their sensations. These people too lived modestly, making do with small rooms, with pensions, having happily divested themselves of most of their worldly goods. They were returning to nature, which was perhaps a lesson worth learning. The revelation—for it was nothing less—was that one did not have to sit down and wait to be transformed. One could, and should, go out to meet nature half way.”
― Anita Brookner, Visitors

“Mrs May marvelled at the purposeful progress of this rather stout woman, who, under guise of perfect suburban conformity, might even now be contemplating a visit to the temples of South-East Asia. I could have done that, she thought; all it takes is a little courage. But it was the sort of courage she signally lacked. Courage to live alone, yes, and to die alone when the time came; courage to meet the empty day formally dressed and scented; courage to confront long endless Sundays, sustained only by a diet of newspapers and walks round the garden, the latter curtailed in case she was observed by idlers at their windows. What was missing was the courage that would enable her to put long distances between herself and her home, her bed. Even when married to Henry, and genuinely enjoying their excursions, she had been homesick, although at that stage, she remembered, her home was not entirely her own, so that the homesickness was very slightly mitigated. And she had only to feel Henry’s arm in hers, when he was beginning to be ill, to know that her duty was no longer to herself, that home was to be his refuge, no longer hers.”
― Anita Brookner, Visitors

“But the fact that for the first time in her life she had managed to convince herself of her rights might embolden her to assert her wishes again.”
― Anita Brookner, Visitors

“The amount of time she had at her disposal made it difficult for her to be late for anything, even for her own breakfast. And she suspected that even if she were to waste time she would still find a way to be entirely punctual, to the intense annoyance of those who had never mastered the art. For it was an art, less to do with courtesy than with modesty. Only grander personalities could afford to assume that others would wait.”
― Anita Brookner, Visitors

“She had been unprepared for old age to render her so harmless. It was as if her sins had been wiped away, leaving only concealment in their place.”
― Anita Brookner, Visitors

“Yet for all her solitariness, or her self-sufficiency, she lacked an overriding philosophy to help her deal with encroachments, incursions, and thus fell at the first fence.”
― Anita Brookner, Visitors