"How can you ever know what the right thing is? How can you ever know?" she says.
"You can't. I keep wondering too. Whether I've made an awful mistake....." p.34
Brian, her elder son, was lost at Trondheim, in the Norwegian campaign. After it happened, I would panic sometimes when I was with her, afraid of the gaps in conversations, as though they were cliffs you could fall from-afraid of saying his name. Once I told her, I'm so frightened of reminding you, I don't want to make you upset....And she said, Vivienne, it's not as though you're reminding me of something I've forgotten. It's not as though I don't think of him every moment of every day. The only time I don't think of him is when I'm fast asleep-then every morning I wake up and I have to learn it again. p. 35
"Which is the best book here?" he says.
I smile.
"That's an impossible question," I say. p.154
but then of course life intervened, as it has a habit of doing. p.157
" Getting old is strange," I say. It isn't at all how you think it's going to be." ....."Yet sometimes I feel as if I'm still waiting for my life to begin." I'm speaking slowly working out exactly what I mean......."....But life doesn't wait - it trickles between your fingers, trickles away....."
"Sometimes I feel as though the real things are passing me by. As though I've been pushed to the margins of life...."p.158
And I think just for a moment that yes, that was sad, and how could you live, not knowing when the one you loved would leave you. And then thinking that it's always like that. p.184
"But life doesn't always give you what you want," he says. His eyes on me. "Well most of the time it doesn't." p. 186
"Maybe it's my fault. maybe I've read her too many stories.'
He smiles - that smile I love, that fills his eyes with light.
"A child cannot be read too many stories," he says. "That is impossible." p.258
