The Other Lives of Miss Emily White Quotes

“And a new vista opened before me - all the narrow corridors and high walls, the dainty little steps and meekly bowed heads falling away, to be replaced by a wide blue horizon. It was another life, a different life, and at last, I felt I could breathe.
It was unconventional to be sure, but what did I care for convention? It had never cared much for me.”
― A.J. Elwood, The Other Lives of Miss Emily White

“The impressions of her that I'd held so dear were nothing but illusions created by my own mind. I had sought companionship and so that was what I'd found. There had been so many different versions of her, but perhaps in the end, none of them were real. They were only what I wanted to see; everything I had wished her to be to me.”
― A.J. Elwood, The Other Lives of Miss Emily White

“For a moment her hands rested there and then she drew me in, shifting her hands to my back, holding me close. She placed her cheek against mine.
'Dearest,' I heard the word, a whisper between us. I did not know, then or ever after, which one of us had spoken.”
― A.J. Elwood, The Other Lives of Miss Emily White

“Those memories were too private, too precious, and I didn't want to dilute their colours by sharing them, like paint washed out by too much water. But for the first time I thought that perhaps, one day, I might. I could hand them to her, those memories, placing them in her hands like delicate blooms, and they wouldn't be spoiled; they wouldn't be broken.”
― A.J. Elwood, The Other Lives of Miss Emily White

“I turned to her, and she kept on gazing at me, her expression at once candid and unreadable, like the surface of a painting seen so close it no longer made sense. Her eyes were not simply grey, I realised. They contained hints of green, even of gold, and I couldn't look away.”
― A.J. Elwood, The Other Lives of Miss Emily White

“Her confidence was a ray of sunlight striking into me. And I felt how constrained I had been, suffocated by the closeness of corsets and high walls and narrow corridors and all the lives shut away or waiting to begin; by the things I must or mustn't do, all the ways I had been found wanting.”
― A.J. Elwood, The Other Lives of Miss Emily White

“But mine isn't the face I am thinking of - the one that has troubled me, followed me, haunting my dreams and my waking hours alike for so many years, always so close I half expect her to appear in the mirror at my side, peeking over my shoulder.”
― A.J. Elwood, The Other Lives of Miss Emily White

“Does it come to everyone, this being left behind? Or is it only that I never really moved on, and a part of me remains in Fulford, despite all I have done with my life?”
― A.J. Elwood, The Other Lives of Miss Emily White