Barbara

“Sometimes, he thought, one should take a long, hard look at old friends. Like old clothes in a cupboard, there comes the moment to examine for moth. Perhaps throw them out and forget them. Yes.”
― Jane Gardam, Last Friends

“Imogen,” he said with forced patience, “you have plenty of occupations of your own, and you don’t care to do the things that give a great deal of pleasure to me – when I have time to do them. You don’t want to fish or shoot and you can’t drive my car, which would be a help to me sometimes. Am I to understand that you object to my having the companionship of another woman who can do these things?”
― Elizabeth Jenkins, The Tortoise and the Hare

“But there is something else which I have written and which I want to read to you while I still have time,’ Fritz told Karoline. ‘It will not truly exist until you have heard it.’ ‘Is”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower: A Novel

“had never been capable of adjusting the reality of facts to my advantage, and maybe that’s why I was so exhausted.”
― Domenico Starnone, Trust: A Novel