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Bravest thing about people, Miss Joan, is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.

Perhaps she would never write again. She would have that life that she supposed other women have: shopping, cooking, arranging dinner parties, meeting friends for lunch. All those worldly acquaintances who had been so kind with their invitations to little gatherings and whom she had hitherto repaid only with a desire that they should see her garden.

I am no longer young, she thought; this is my last chance. Penelope is right. It is high time I forgot my hopes, the hopes I was born with, and faced reality. I shall never have that for which I long with my inmost heart. How could I? It is too late. But there are all the comforts of what is called maturity: pleasant companionship, comfort, proper holidays. It is a reasonable prospect.

I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine.
An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together.'

I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of a energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode. My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.

People expect writers to entertain them, she reflected. They consider that writers should be gratified simply by performing their task to the audience's satisfaction.

For this was a land of prudently harvested plenty, a land which had conquered human accidents, leaving only the weather distressingly beyond control.

In London or Dublin the girls would look back to the house for healing. The remembered light on the empty hayfields would grow magical, the green shade of the beeches would give out a delicious coolness as they tasted again the sardines between slices of bread: when they were away the house would become the summer light and shade above their whole lives.

We were never sure we'd be alive from one day to the next. Don't let them pull wool over your eyes. The war was the cold, the wet, standing to your neck in a drain for a whole night with bloodhounds on your trail, not knowing how you could manage the next step toward the end of a long march. That was the war: not when the band played and a bloody politician stepped forward to put Rowers on the ground.

If he remembered it only as it looked right now, would he miss it as much? He couldn't tell.
He stood there for maybe five minutes, but he couldn't make the house register on his mind at all. It might be any other house on the block; it might be anyone's.

When he was far away from home, and picturing what it looked like, this wasn't the way he saw it at all. He saw it as it had been when he was small - a giant of a place, with children playing on the sunlit lawn and yellow flowers growing in two straight lines along the walk. Now, as he looked at the house, he tried to make the real picture stay in his memory.

When he was across the street from his house he turned and looked back at it. It sat silently in the twilight, with the bay windows lit yellow by the lamps inside and the irregular little stained-glass and rose windows glowing here and there against the vague white clapboards.

Would he just lie back and say what came into his mind the minute it came, removing that filter that was always there and that strained the useless thoughts and the secret thoughts from being made known?
But how could that be any gift to her?

I like kids. Joanne takes too good care of just the one. She needs a whole group of them. She's always saying how Carol's got to be secure-feeling, got to have no wonders about being loved or not. But this way she just makes Carol nervous - follows her around reading psychology books. Wants to know what her nightmares are about. I say let her alone - kids grow up all right.

Sometimes whole weeks would be in blocks. Someone could say, 'What's this week been like?' and right off the bat you could say, 'Oh, lousy. My father won't let me have the car because he caught me scratching off in front of Stacy's café the other day. Or it would be a great week, for another reason just that clear-cut. It's not that way any more.”

"Oh, well, what I mean is, the days seem to come in pieces now. They used to be in blocks - all one solid color to them.

Inside, there was the mossy brown smell that he had been raised with, that seemed to be part and parcel of the house and was a wonderful smell if you were glad to be home and an unbearable smell if you were not. And mingled with it were the more temporary, tangible smells - bacon, coffee, hot radiators, newly ironed dresses, bath powder.

When he arrives in Duke of Wellington Road, darkness has long ago preceded him and for a few moments he sits in his car after he has drawn it up on the gravel, not wishing to open the front door and step into the hall until he has gathered a little strength that may be of assistance in the silence of the house. In time he finds it, and mounts the four steps to his hall door.

Only being together, only their love, can bring redemption: she knows that perfectly. She knew it when Christmas passed and he did not return. She knew it during the snow that came in January; she knew it when the first week of February came gustily in, when she went to see his mother.

'There's nothing wrong in it,' he murmured, saying more, nothing wrong in it when two people love one another. Yet the night she wrote the letter she felt that maybe, after all, there had been: the old-fashioned sin you had to confess if you went to Confession; the sin of being greedy, the sin of not being patient.
And why should she have supposed that the happiness his love had given her was her due, and free?

Still searching among the faces around her, she again experiences the sense of punishment she was first aware of the night she wrote the last of her letters: a call to order, a call to account for the happiness she had so recklessly indulged in.

'The other day I thought it was you was the bride': the Monday after the wedding it was when he spoke to her on the street, coming up to her outside Chawke's.
She loves making it happen again, better than any dream or any imagining because it's real. 'Ah no, no,' she said, shaking her head, not adding that she didn't think she'd ever be a bride.

…I took it for granted that her fate would be better than mine. I felt more strongly than ever the meaninglessness of school, I knew clearly that I had embarked on that path years earlier only to seem enviable to Lila. And now instead books had no importance for her. I stopped preparing for my exams, I didn't sleep that night.

I was promoted to the third year with all tens, but at home no one was surprised or celebrated me. I saw that they were satisfied, yes, and I was pleased, but they gave the event no weight. My mother, in fact, found my scholastic success completely natural….

As the bookmarks don’t stay long in the right place🙃

‘I'll tell you,' said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, 'what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter- as I did!’

Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?' Biddy quietly asked me, after a pause.
'I don't know,' I moodily answered.
'Because, if it is to spite her,' Biddy pursued, 'I should think—but you know best-that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think—but you know best—she was not worth gaining over.'