"A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces."
- Elizabeth Bowen
"If they should only be ill,' she said, 'there would be so many little things we could do for them. It does seem in a kind of a way an opportunity. I often think it is only when a man is ill that he un..."
"Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband."
"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..."
"And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their..."
"She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish."
"Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't the..."
"The way one is envisaged by other people - what easier way is there of envisaging oneself? There is a fatalism in one's acceptance of it. Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice - cho..."
"Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude."
"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 baterrings we sometimes hear in each other ..."