Julie > Recent Status Updates

He died on Tuesday of a stroke. ... I loved him, and couldn't have shown him even if I had been allowed. I think it is never possible to show those we love -- only to try to pick them up after they have fallen.

He knew that Mr. Spargo was one of those people to whom he would never have anything to say. You were happier with furniture.

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When she was ready she stooped and kissed you to show her love, but it was a level helping, like she doled out porridge or potato, to keep everybody quiet.

They talked about what was 'right' and 'honest', and the price of things, but people looked down at their plates if you said something was 'beautiful'.

He loved the feel of a smooth stone, or to take a flower to pieces, to see what there was inside. He loved the pepper tree breaking into light, and the white hens rustling by moonlight in the black branches, and the sleepy sound of the hen shit dropping. He could do nothing about it, though. Not yet. He could only carry all of it in his head. Not talk about it. Because Mumma and Pa would not have understood.

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.

For now that the others had gone, it would be as it had always been. He would see her shyness, her stiffness. And it would frighten him, he would remember he was alone with her. He would listen politely to whatever inanity she would manage to get out and then he would see the hysteria in her eyes, the hateful hot flush in her cheeks. And he would go as all men had gone before him.

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.

I became the most appalling falconry bore. ... Soon I was an expert on falconry the way the carpet salesman who used to come into the bookshop where I once worked was an expert on the Greco-Persian wars. ... I was the carpet salesman at the battle of Thermopylae.

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.