Mark

“She had that look - scared and sort of paralysed but frantic underneath - that girls got when they could think of only the one thing. It was a look that told him it would be her first time.”
― John Banville, Christine Falls

“She tasted for the first time honey-sweet and dangerous happiness: dangerous because, as she before long began to learn, precarious.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“In a library in a staid South Coast resort of retirees ”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“All Germans carry an image of Adolph Hitler inside them....Even ones like me, who hated Hitler and everything he stood for. This face with its tousled hair and postage-stamp mustache haunts us all now and forevermore and, like a quiet flame that can never be extinguished, burns itself into our souls. The Nazis used to talk of a thousand -year empire. But sometimes I think that because of what we did, the name of Germany and the Germans will live in infamy for a thousand years. That it will take the rest of the world a thousand years to forget. Certainly if I live to be a thousand years old, I'll never forget some of the things I saw. And some of the things I did.”
― Philip Kerr, A Quiet Flame