His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.

Cassandra wondered at the mind’s cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life’s end, her grandmother’s head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was...

That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.

Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so – to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!

Then he led her to sit by him on a fallen gum trunk, smooth and white, and he leaned to whisper in her ear. Transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen...

Those who live in memories are never really dead.

Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing [as a nice safe history].

That was the nature of history, of course: notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors.

There was some part of me that never left that house. Rather, some part of the house that wouldn’t leave me.

Hope, how she had grown to hate the word. It was an insideious seed planted inside a person’s soul, surviving covertly on little tending, then flowering so spectacularly that none could help but cherish it.

it was enough just to free the words so that the voices in her head were stilled.

To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn’t hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.

Vivien thought how ugly adults could be, how weak. So used to getting what they wanted that they didn’t know the first thing about being brave.

It’ll be a change,” says Marcus. “Something different.””Not a mystery.”Marcus laughs. “No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history.”Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.

La vida es demasiado breve para ser moderado.

They were young; time hadn’t yet rubbed at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions…

But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960’s.

No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don’t approximate. Don’t settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching...

Organizas tu vida con lo que tienes, no con lo que te falta.

Csak az firtatja a jövőt, aki a jelenben boldogtalan.

You’ll beat this. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you will. You’re a survivor.””I don’t want to survive it.””I know that, too,” Nell had said. “And it’s fair enough. But sometimes we don’t...

She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

It was the sibling thing, I suppose. I was fascinated by the intricate tangle of love and duty and resentment that tied them together. The glances they exchanged; the complicated balance of power established over...

Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn’t flat or linear....

Poisons are more my thing

Mother didn’t understand that children aren’t frightened by stories; that their lives are full of far more frightening things than those contained in fairy tales.

It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the...

You make a life out of what you have, not what you’re missing.

The world was an awfully large place and it wasn’t easy to find a person who’d gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.

It’s a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past, should exist only in memories glimpsed through the fog of...

The prospect of an early death sits differently upon each person. In some it gifts maturity far outweighing their age and experience: calm acceptance blossoms into a beautiful nature and soft countenance. In others, however,...

Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.

She’d slept terribly the night before. The room, the bed, were both comfortable enough, but she’d been plagued with strange dreams, the sort that lingered upon waking but slithered away from memory as she tried...

És meséltem neked az emlékeimről. Nem mindenről. Célt tűztem ki magamnak, és nem akarlak a múltam meséivel untatni. Inkább arról a különös érzésről meséltem, hogy az emlékek valóságosabbá váltak számomra, mint az életem. Arról, hogy...

You must learn to know the difference between tales and the truth, my Liza, she would say. Fairy tales have a habit of ending too soon. They never show what happens afterwards when the prince...

They’d fallen into an easy routine, the three of them. Breakfast together in the morning, then Hughie would leave for work and she and Nell would get started in the house. Lil found she liked...

I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested–intrigued even–by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.