« I don’t want to be married just for the sake of being married. I
can’t think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone
I can’t talk to, or worse, someone I can’t be silent with. »
« Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books
that brings them to their perfect readers. »
« That’s what I love about reading : one tiny thing will
interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and
another bit there will lead you on to a third book. It’s geometricaly
progressive »
« Bath is a glorious town : lovely crescents of white,
upstanding houses instead of London’s black, gloomy buildings or – worse still
– piles of rubble that were once buildings. It is bliss to breathe in clean,
fresh air with no coal smoke and no dust. The weather is cold, but it isn’t
London’s dank chill. Even the people on the street look different – upstanding
like their houses, not grey and hunched like Londoners. »
« Night-time train travel is wonderful again ! »
« I don’t consider myself a real peeper – they go in for bedrooms,
but it’s families in sitting rooms or kitchen that thrill me. I can imagine
their whole lives from a glimpse of bookshelves, or desks, or burning candles,
or bright cushions. »
« The poor child had never seen so many men in one place in her
life. Think of it – a whole generation grown up without dances or teas or
flirting. »
« I look a lively, dashing, haute-coutured (if this isn’t a French
verb, it should be) thirty. »
« I didn’t fire the delivery boy – I promoted him. He got me what
I couldn’t manage to get for myself : an introduction to you. »
« Men are more interesting in books than they are in real
life. »
« How did you know that I like white lilac above all
flowers ? »
« Do you live by the river ? I hope so, because people who
live near running water are much nicer than people who don’t. I’d be cross as a
snake if I lived inland. »
« She’s one of those women who are more beautiful at sixty than
they could possibly have been at twenty »
« I told her the story and she presented her cheek an
infinitesimal quarter of an inch to be kissed. »
« ‘I’ve come to tell you my intentions.’
‘For my house ?’ I snapped.
‘No, for Elizabeth,’ he said. And that’s what he did – just as if I
were the Victorian father and he the suitor. He perched on the edge of a chair
in my drawing room and told me that he planned to come back to the Island the
moment the war was over, marry Elizabeth, grow freesias, read, and forget about
war. By the time he’d finished, I was a little bit in love with him myself. »
« How could I have ever considered marrying him ? One year as
his wife, and I’d have become one of those abject, quaking women who look at
their husbands when someone asks them a question. I’ve always despised that
type, but I see how it happens now. »
« Remy, like most Frenchwomen, is practical. She would want
evidence of Dawsey’s feelings for her before she changed her plans willy-nilly. »
« For now, I will ask Kit over for supper and to spend the night
with me so that Juliet and Dawsey can have the freedom of shrubbery – just like
Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet. »
The
Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann
Shaffer & Annie Barrows
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