Quotes from Eva Rice

Men, I thought, were more trouble than they were worth. Really, one should stick to books where one sees the hero coming a mile off.

Like all intelligent people, she functions very well in extreme disorder.

Mama was amazing like that; I spent most of my teenage years assuming that she knew nothing about me, and all of my twenties realizing that she knew everything.

There's never any warning that something extraordinary is about to happen, is there?

If I could take people out of their heads for a little while, if I could give them a dose of fantasy, that was all that mattered. You can't put a price on escape.

As he started 'Whisky and Gin' and the cheering and the shrieking filled my senses, I thought of Mama, shattered by the war and Papa's death and I wished with all my heart that she could understand how it felt to be us that night - how it felt to be eighteen and unbeaten, eighteen and alive.

Would it ever, ever leave? I had become used to the ache now; it was with me all the time, and never seemed to lessen. Time was no healer, I decided, but it was a great accommodator.

I didn't hear you come in. I was away with the ghosts of my beautiful youth.

The odd thing about Mama was that she liked to think of herself as a doomy sort of person, but there was a natural optimism in her that refused to be defeated, however hard she squashed it down, and I know that she never lost faith completely.

But wonderful people nearly always combine their wonderfulness with other characteristic that can drive on utterly crazy

One would never write a single word if one knew the horrors that lay ahead,' agreed Charlotte. 'But if you sell copies by the sackload, you may well forget the horrors,' I agreed quickly.

Happiness can be frightening when one is not accustomed to the sensation.

Goodness me, Charlotte, she went on, much her old self again, who on earth ever fell in love with anyone who looked handsome? What a ghastly bore handsome is.

didn't trust my powers of recollection; in the past, I had known myself to turn perfectly ordinary boys into Howard Keel overnight, only to be bitterly let down when they actually appeared in front of me again.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music

The thing is, baby, you don't have long,' he said. 'We don't have long. Dancers are like dragonflies – in one day, dead in the water the next. So you just have to work, all the time, because if you don't love it, and if you don't want to do it so much that it's like breathing to you, then you might as well stop now.

People were drunk, but on the cusp of drunken brilliance, which only ever lasted a few minutes and had to be harnessed and harvested while it could be.

How could something as significant to one person mean so little to another?

yet it was just as it is when you go back to a place from childhood – both exactly the same and quite different.

The garden looks wonderful, Mama, I would always say when we arrived back at the house. It's chaos, darling. I like chaos.