Summer Will Show Quotes

“Sitting here, and thus, she had attained to a state which she could never have desired, not even conceived. And being so unforeseen, so alien to her character and upbringing, her felicity had an absolute perfection; no comparison between the desired and the actual could tear holes in it, no ambition whisper, But this is not quite what you wanted, is it?”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show

“Stronger than rage, astonishment, contempt, the pleasurable sense that at last she had slapped Frederick's face, the less pleasurable surmise that his slap back would be longer-lasting; stronger even than the desire to see Minna was her feeling that of all things, all people, she most at this moment wished to see Ingelbrecht, and the sturdy assurance that she would find in him everything that she expected. If she had gone up the stairs in the rue de la Carabine on her knees, she could not have ascended with a more zealotical faith that there would be healing at the top; and when he opened the door to her, enquiring politely if her errands had gone well she replied with enthusiasm, "Perfectly. My husband--it was he I went to see--has just threatened to cut me off with a penny."

"A lock-out," said Ingelbrecht. "Very natural. It is a symptom of capitalistic anxiety. I suppose he has always been afraid of you."

She nodded, and her lips curved in a grin of satisfaction.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show

“What good? None, possibility. One does not await a revolution as one awaits the grocer's van, expecting to be handed packets of sugar and tapioca.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show

“You speak with little pity, my man.'
'I'm like the gentry, then. Like the parsons, and the justices, and the lords and ladies. Like that proud besom down to Blandamer.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show

“God, an enormous darkness, hung looped over half her sky, an ever-present menace, a cloud waiting to break.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show