🌹’s Reviews > Hotel du Lac > Status Update

And yet I have always, as an act of will, written myself back into a state of acceptance, she thought. Why does the recipe no longer work? Is it because the whole process now seems too much like the hair shirt of the penitent, angling to get back into God’s good graces? Am I just sick to death of making yet another effort? Will it not be very comfortable not to have to make this particular effort any more?

It is not true that Satan makes work for idle hands to do; that is just what he doesn’t. Satan should be at hand with all manner of glittering distractions, false but irresistible promises, inducements to reprehensible behaviour. Instead of which one is simply offered a choice between overwork and half-hearted idleness. And that is scarcely a choice at all. One cannot even rely on Satan to fulfill his obligations.

And at this very late hour, she felt her heart beat, and her reason, that controlling element, to fragment, as hidden areas, dangerous shoals, erupted into her consciousness.….

Perhaps the champagne was making me feel tired, perhaps I was tired already, but suddenly I had the uncanny feeling that this was all for show, that everything was a pretence, that this had been a dinner of masks, that no one was ever, ever going to tell the truth again.

“Haven’t you learned that there is no such thing as complete harmony between two people, however much they profess to love one another? …You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish…To assume your own centrality may mean an entirely new life.”