Julie’s Reviews > The Eye of the Storm > Status Update

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.