The Retreat Quotes

“The little island is dominated by a grand white house which might be showing its age but which is still striking. She used to want to live in the houses she saw pictured on chocolate box lids, cottages that were inseparable from that sweet smell, like gingerbread houses. This house looks nothing like those long-ago fairy-tale cottages, but it has the same kind of appeal. She would like to try to capture it on the page”
― Alison Moore, The Retreat

“You’re supposed to make sacrifices,’ says the man. ‘Sacrifice yourself for your art. Comfort is the enemy of progress and all that”
― Alison Moore, The Retreat

“She wonders if, even now, it is too late for her to go to art college. But she has a fear that she will find she does not have the talent for it after all, or the motivation, the passion, or something. Her godfather was an artist, and moderately successful. But his creative experience seemed to consist of long periods of slogging, or blockage, and maddening frustration, in pursuit of brief orgasmic moments of insight or creative breakthrough which Sandra has never had and can hardly imagine, but which he seemed to live for and which she wants”
― Alison Moore, The Retreat