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Vanessa laughs for a moment—the sound has a dark tinge to it, an uncontrolled terror. She knows that if she keeps laughing, it will be exactly like crying. It will take over her body—her horror shaking within her to get out—and she will not stop until it is far too late. She is teetering on the edge of mania, and it is so tempting to give in to it, to lose all touch with what is happening and let her mind leave her.

Joan so loved the beauty in this world: showing people the stars, spotting the fuzzy glimmer of the Orion Nebula with just her eyes, the rare moments when auroras are visible, trying one more time to really nail Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor, rereading The Awakening, listening to Joni Mitchell, drawing for so long, so late into the night that her palm cramped,running so far that she forgot to think....

She wasn't going to the station, so they said goodbye in the hall, a tiny cupboard built for a man to hang his hat in, for a woman to read a telephone message in - not for heroic partings.

The rest of the sewing party looked dubiously at Mrs. Ramsay. [...] Mrs. Twistle coughed gently. Everything about Mrs. Twistle, who had been in service with a ducal family as a girl, was gentle, even her way of uttering sentiments that would have set the strawberry leaves shuddering with the cold breath of revolution.

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It was a shock when, only a day or two later, things began to happen. One morning, before the old ladies had got their teeth in or their curled fronts adjusted or their stays laced for the day, the terrible noise started. The China tea slopped over in the trembling saucer as Miss Ewing listened, the windows in the Palm Court shivered as though gripped by an ague.

Things are inert: they have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change even though they remain the same. They are there and yet not there: tangible ghosts, condemned to survive in a world they no longer belong to...standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about.

Amazement. When my father died I did not cry at all. I had said to my sister, ‘It will be the same for Maman.’ I had understood all my sorrows up until that night: even when they flowed over my head I recognized myself in them. This time my despair escaped from my control: someone other than myself was weeping in me.

She began to inspect her surroundings, as she always did when unobserved. A lifetime of quiet watchfulness had convinced her that the truth about people was seldom to be found in the things they freely admitted. There was always more below the surface than above.

"Memoirs?" people ask. "What's the hurry? Why don't you wait awhile?" It puzzles me. Wait for what? And for how long? I fail to see what age has to do with memory. I am sixty-six years old, and I belong to a generation obsessed by a thirst to retain and transmit everything.

Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have.

Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He lived in a world shining & fresh & as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when the world put up fences he plunged against the wire, [....] he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended.

Miraculous things occur so disappointingly seldom, Larry has come to believe you have to make them happen. [...] The eagle dwarfed him. He was afraid to watch it take off and reveal the great width of its wings. No wonder these birds are a protected species. If we let all the wonders go we'll become crazy with our sense of loss.

To temporize means to do what is necessary to tide you over until a more favourable time comes. It means to step out of time's continuum, to put time on hold, to stop time from happening, to open an epochal space. You find a dimple in time & you burrow & hide in it & let real time - or what others call real time - slide by you. You are, as one is with modern watches, operating on two, perhaps more, time zones.

The two ladies produced a fairly favourable impression [....] It is not every one who has the courage to bring dogs into an expensive private hotel; to bring one dog indicates that you are not accustomed to deny yourself small pleasures for the sake of a few extra shillings; to bring two indicates that you have no fear of hotel-managers and that you are in the habit of regarding your own whim as nature's law.

Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for a change we sink to something lower.

Wise people, when they are in the wrong, always put themselves right by finding fault with the people against whom they have sinned. [...] There is no withstanding it. Who can go systematically to work and, having done battle with the primary accusation and settled that, then bring forward a countercharge and support that also? Life is not long enough for such labours.

Kanakis continued on his way with a spring in his step; he was pleased there would be cakes again, that people in Vienna still had a taste for them and were able to make them. People were still the same: they liked cakes - and probably music - and all the other pleasures of the senses. His instinct had been right, the cakes confirmed it.

The next few days he spent walking about the city, once more getting the feel of streets he knew so well but had half forgotten, trying to remember what certain houses looked like before they had been reduced to rubble.... Recognition slowly overcame estrangement, as one at first hesitatingly & then confidently recognizes an old friend - however altered by the ravages of sickness & of time...

It was his first country walk since his illness. The demands of his job meant that walking had always been a rare and special pleasure. Now he moved with something of the uncertainty of those first tentative steps of convalescence, muscles and senses rediscovering remembered pleasures, not with keen delight but with the gentle acceptance of familiarity.

The Stanhopes would visit you in your sickness (provided it were not contagious), would bring you oranges, French novels, and the last new bit of scandal, and then hear of your death or your recovery with an equally indifferent composure. Their conduct to each other was the same as to the world; they bore and forebore...

The great characteristic of the Stanhopes might probably be said to be heartlessness; but this want of feeling was, in most of them, accompanied by so great an amoun t of good nature as to make itself but little noticeable to the world.

"To destroy a diary must be like destroying memory. One would begin with the years one could best endure to lose. Old memories are tenacious. He made a start by burning the last volume."

She had pictured herself with a group of patients sitting in their chairs in the sun and looking at the sea; the sea, constantly changing but eternal, comforting and yet frightening, speaking to her in its ceaseless rhythm that nothing really mattered, that human misery was of small account, that everything passed in time.

Anna Quangel felt herself trembling. He might be right: whether their act was big or small, no one could risk more than his life. Each according to his strength and abilities, but the main thing was, you fought back.

Isabel noticed the transition from present to past tense and thought that it must be one of the most difficult of all adjustments to make when one loses somebody. Or even when a love affair comes to an end: the present is abolished and at the same time there is no future tense.