Status Updates From The eye of the storm

Macrory turned on what was, for him, an exceptionally agreeable look. "I never thought of friendship as something you pay for, Dorothy. Not like love."

And remember mother's practical ethics: one can drown in compassion if one answers every call, it's another way of suicide. All the best aphorisms have a habit of doing you dirt sooner or later, and the illusory claw reflected in the water conveyed something of the same distress of the actual hand lying on the hemstitched sheet.

The stalactites of charm dripped and glittered in this cavern of a room.

Anne Macrory had the air of a social worker trapped in a life she had warned against.

Thoughts before going further: It isn't possible to drive backwards into one's childhood. You can put the car in reverse, you can try, you can even convince yourself you're heading toward where you began. But no matter how carefully you maneuver, the road itself only exists in one direction. Childhood isn't a place you can revisit; it's a country that disappeared the moment you left it.

Neither of her own children had looked her full in the face, either from photographs or in life.

If you could describe your storm; but you could not. You can never convey in words the utmost in experience. Whatever is given to you to live, you alone can live, and re-live, and re-live, till it is all gasped out of you.

So she lay gasping, as though the tide had almost fully receded from this estuary of sheets, while they watched her, she could tell, with their unregenerate gulls' eyes.

... And woke, not refreshed, but the despair wrung out, ...

... she wondered at the law that decrees that almost everybody shall desire some other human being.

Dorothy de Lascabanes did not have to remind herself she had never hated anyone so bitterly as she had hated their mother on their brief visit to Brumby Island. She should remember Elizabeth Hunter's treachery on that occasion could only make the most brutally reasonable plan her children might now conceive for her seem morally defensible.

Because nobody had ever brought her flowers, she failed to see a reason for them, unless plastic: plastic lasts.

He was going on again a bit about this "Botterchelly Flora".

She would have liked to ask Col about this "Botterchelly". She was so uneducated.

The needs of old people, by the time they're almost gaga, must be so simple: not much more than a comfortable bed, a kindly hand, and plenty of bread-and-butter custard, I should have thought.

She turned and said, "I'm afraid nobody - none of us- loved him as he deserved." While expressing her own inadequacy, it should at the same time have paid the solicitor out.

Mother specialized in slaves, of whom Father was the most valuable.

As for being her children, she remembered them as sensations in her womb, then as almost edible, comfortingly soft parcels of fat, till later they were turned into leggy, hostile, scarcely human, beings already preparing themselves for flight.

In retrospect, Mary de Santis realized her parents' love for each other had been their religion. Because she had grown up excluded from this, without their being conscious of it, she had evolved tentatively, painfully, a faith of her own.

The other awfulness is: you can sincerely love those you betray.

Mrs hunter's tone was one of resignation, "I often wonder why more old people aren't murdered by those who look after them. A lot are, but usually by relatives: those cases of "mercy killing."
"What ideas you get!" Sister Manhood could have bitten her own tongue off; when it was her thoughts which had given her secret away.

She had never been a skilled beggar, perhaps because it was only late in life that there had been any need to beg; the alternate solution was something she must not think about, though she often did in terrifying detail.