Great Throughts Treasury

"Her look drank in the blush…"

"Here was a way of escape open to her; she could pass down the long chain of rooms, link on link of frescoed emptiness with garlands duskier in the dusk, with little, bald square windows, lashless eyes, staring out on to the darkening sky."

"I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am."

"I can’t think what Lois can be doing. She peered through gaps in the shrubbery towards towards the gate of the garden. This concern for her friend she put up and twirled like a parasol between them. She sighed: the expansion of her thin little frame, the rise and fall of her two little points of bosom were clearly visible under her white silk jersey. Her panama hat turned down and light tufts of hair came out in fluttering commas against her cheek bones."

"I don’t know, said Gilda Roche. The less of me that’s visible, the more I’m there."

"I don't know what's come over this place,' Maud stated. 'However, the Lord did, so in despair He showed me what I had better do.' 'And did the Lord suggest your sticking up your father for ten shillings?' 'No, I thought of that,' said Maud, not turning a hair."

"I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and that it's the knockings and batterings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banality."

"I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road."

"If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea."

"In the cupboards her dresses hung bosom to bosom coldly, as though they had never been worn. She ran down like a clock whose hands falter and point for too long at one hour and minute: the clock stops dead. She dissolved like breath on a mirror and trailed away like an echo when nobody speaks again."

"Ireland is a great country to die or be married in."

"It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets."

"Jocelyn’s bedroom curtains swelled a little over the noisy window. The room was stuffy and – insupportable, so that she did not know where to turn. The house, fingered outwardly by the wind that dragged unceasingly past the walls, was, within, a solid silence: silence heavy as flesh. Jocelyn dropped her wrap to the floor, then watched how its feathered edges crept a little. A draught came in, under her bathroom door."

"Judas and almond trees frivolled among the austere cedars; cypresses marched to the lake from terrace to terrace, and wax-yellow freesias sweetened the April twilight."

"Julian suggested that they should take the whole day out and lunch in the country. But Cecilia said no: Buckinghamshire was too small, not many times the length of his car; they would soon overshoot the school and run out of the county; they must not overshoot the school."

"Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say Oh look! Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there."

"Language is a mixture of statement and evocation."

"Livy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband."

"Lois entered the mill. Fear heightened her gratification; she welcomed its inrush, letting her look climb the scabby and livid walls to the frightful stare of the sky. Cracks ran down; she expected, now with detachment, to see them widen, to see the walls peel back from a cleft – like the House of Usher’s."

"Lunch went through with strands of talk spun out fine till they dwindled to thin little patches of silence."

"Makes of men date, like makes of cars..."

"Maria was forbearingly swamped by the family; she felt as if she were trying to box an eiderdown… But rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate – it slid and melted away."

"Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought."

"Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique."

"Miss Fitzgerald hurried out of the Hotel into the road. Here she stood still, looking purposelessly up and down in the blinding sunshine and picking at the fingers of her gloves. She was frightened by an interior quietness and by the thought that she had for once in her life stopped thinking and might never begin again."

"My dear Francie, life is too short for all this. (Though that was not the matter with life, really: life was too long.)"

"Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone."

"No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden."

"Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms."

"Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have."

"Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it."

"Nothing could be as dear as the circle of reading-light round her solitary pillow."

"Now into the hall Mrs. Tommy Cran came swimming from elsewhere, dividing with curved little strokes the festive air – hyacinths and gunpowder. Her sleeves, in a thousand ruffles, fled from her elbows. She gained Uncle Archer’s lapels and, bobbing, floated from this attachment. Uncle Archer, verifying the mistletoe, loudly kissed her face of a delicate pink sugar… The room where they all sat seemed to be made of glass, it collected the whole daylight; the candles were still waiting. Over the garden, day still hung like a pink flag; over the trees like frozen feathers, the enchanted icy lake, the lawn. The table was in the window. As Herbert was brought in a clock struck four; the laughing heads all turned in a silence brief as a breath’s intake. The great many gentlemen and the rejoicing ladies leaned apart; he and Nancy looked at each other gravely. […] Now Nancy, standing up very straight to cut the cake, was like a doll stitched upright into its box, apt, if you should cut the string at its back, to pitch right forward and break its delicate fingers."

"One could only conclude that he considered Miss Ames and Mrs Logan as part of the fittings of the shop – ‘customers’ such as every shop kept two of among the mirrors and the chairs; disposed appropriately; symbolic, like the two dolls perpetually recumbent upon the drawing-room sofa of a doll’s house."

"Over the mottled carpet curled strange pink fronds: someone dead now, buying this carpet, had responded to an idea of beauty. Lois thought how in Marda’s bedroom, when she was married, there might be a dark blue carpet with a bloom on it like a grape, and how this room, this hour would be forgotten. Already the room seemed full of the dusk of oblivion. And she hoped that instead of fading to dust in summers of empty sunshine, the carpet would burn with the house in a scarlet night to make one flaming call upon Marda’s memory."

"Perplexed, Cecilia lighted a cigarette: indicating a notice the waitress asked her firmly to put it out again. Julian said Indian tea disagreed with him: the waitress said there was no China. Ridiculous! cried Cecilia, and all the mothers turned around. Cecilia, smoldering like a Siamese cat at a show, was glad to find their strawberry punnets left stains on the table-cloth."

"Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible."

"Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain."

"Rich women live at such a distance from life that very often they never see their money — the Queen, they say, for instance, never carries a purse."

"Rosalind flung herself into the drawing-room; it was honey-colored and lovely in the pale spring light, another little clock was ticking in the corner, there were more bowls of primroses and black-eyed, lowering anemones. The tarnished mirror on the wall distorted and reproved her angry face in its mild mauveness."

"She became incoherent. Maurice’s irritation audibly increased. They were both conscious of the darkening, rain-loud room."

"She danced beautifully with her slim, balanced partners; they moved like moths, almost soundlessly, their feet hiss-hissing faintly on the parquet. Hewson’s hand brushed across the switchboard, lights would spring up dazzlingly against the ceiling and pour down opulently on the amber floor to play and melt among the shadows of feet."

"She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips."

"She had this one limitation, his darling Lois; she couldn’t look on her own eyes, had no idea what she was, resented almost his attention being so constantly fixed on something she wasn’t aware of."

"She thought a major proposed to her, though he seemed rather old, but he was so much confused and had such a mumbly moustache she could not be certain."

"She thought she need not worry about her youth; it wasted itself spontaneously, like sunshine elsewhere or firelight in an empty room."

"She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her."

"She wanted a massage after her journey, a fitting at her corsetière’s, a new silver saucepan to boil milk in her bedroom, a chat with her specialist and one of those mackintosh coats she had just seen advertised for her dog. She decided to visit her hat shop, which concealed itself upstairs in Mayfair with a discretion so sinister one might expect to rap three times on a panel or be regarded narrowly through a grille."

"She was twenty-one, pretty but brittle and wax-like from steam-heated air. All day long she was just an appearance, a rhythm: in studio or ballroom she expanded into delicate shapes like a Japanese ‘mystery’ flower dropped into water."

"Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak."