Quotes from Rosie Thomas

Death, when it's right there it doesn't seem too huge and terrible to let into your mind.

When you're young, everything carries a twin charge of novelty and infinite possibility

It's the fragment of your past that explains why you have lived your life the way you have done and made the mistakes that you have made

They had lived and known glory, and then they were ddead. She was alive and they were not, and nothing but a heartbeat separated her from them

The richness of the whole world reduced to a choice that was not a choice at all, but a sentence.

The harsh world unjustly reserved its most severe punishments for women.

It's only a house, she thought. But it was more, too. It was Tibby's elaborate, respectable shrine to a family life that had long ago ebbed out of it.

very close at hand, and at the same

What does frighten me is the halfway stage. I am afraid of reduction. After a lifetime's independence – yes, selfish independence as my daughter would rightly claim – I am terrified of being reduced to childhood once more, to helplessness, to seas of confusion from which the cruel lucid intervals poke up like rock shoals.

again. After the relief came unalloyed delight. The news would please everybody.

beside her, Jake Silverman was fighting to pull away from

Mair sat down on the bed. The ancient pink electric blanket was still stretched from corner to corner, and she thought of the weeks of her father's last illness when she had come home to the valley to nurse him, as best she could, and to keep him company. They had enjoyed long, rambling conversations about the past and the people her father had once known.

away, but he swung back

The church bell was ringing, three unvarying insistent peals, 'Come to church, come to church,' that punctuated every Sunday.

patient compromises? 'I was afraid. I was

How age enamels us, she would say. It builds up in layers and locks us inside our own skin, stopping us from breaking out, preventing the outside from burrowing in.

almost forgotten him. In her hours

Is nothing in life ever straight and clear, the way children see it?

Things don't matter, people do