Penny

“Bomber said that the wonderful thing about books was that they were films that played inside your head.”
― Ruth Hogan, The Keeper of Lost Things

“was Innes who damaged the tiles, although none of the current residents of the house know this. On a wet day in the late 1920s, a seven-year-old Innes stole a metal tray from the kitchen and carried it all the way up to the top of the stairs and proceeded to toboggan down, skidding over the carpet, from landing to landing, riding the swells and troughs of the stairs, until he arrived with a resounding crash in the hallway. The impact of the edge of the tray with the Victorian tiles caused a long, snaking crack; Innes hurtled forward to collide with the sharp corner of a coat rack. His screams brought Consuela running from the kitchen, brought his mother down from the drawing room above. There was a lot of blood on the tiles that day, red among the blue and white. He had to have two stitches in his forehead and there would be a small, vertical scar there for the”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Hand That First Held Mine

“It was the small things she took pleasure in. The faint hum of a huge furry bumble bee busily flitting from one flower to another, oblivious to the fact that it was completing a task on which the entire human race depended.”
― Kathryn Hughes, The Letter

“If the war had taught her anything, it was to take nothing for granted: that it wasn’t safe to put off what mattered. Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans