Quotes from Barbara Vine

Helen has reached an age when life itself has become fragile, when each day must be an only half-expected gift, when she knows there can be no future to talk about.

Staying thin wasn't just a losing battle with Cosette but a series of skirmishes in which about fifty percent of the time her side won.

It's dust and it's made of nothing and comes from no where, to cover everything, everywhere.

There is a Jewish joke concerning the man who says of an enemy: Why does he hate me so? I never did him any good.

tenants, non-paying

When the process began, when association started an entering procedure—at, for instance, the sound of a Greek or Spanish place name, the taste of raspberries, the sight of candles out of doors—he had taught himself to touch an escape key, rather like that on the computers he sold.

Lean on me," someone says in Jane Austen to a woman he scarcely knows, and there's no question but that she will, that she takes it for granted.

Ivo had grown more and more like one of those characters in his books who are always groaning about their miserable fate in helplessly loving someone unworthy of their love. Maugham never says much about what that's like for the poor old unworthy object. I could have told him. It's not exactly uplifting for the self-image.

The hands of the watch stood at five past eight. The only kind of death that can be accurately predicted to the minute had taken place, the death that takes its victim, … feet foremost through the floor, Into an empty space. 2 THREE TIMES IN THE past thirty-five years I had seen her name in print.

To say that someone is tranquil doesn't, after all, imply contentment, only perhaps a peaceful acceptance of or yielding to an unhappy fate.

They come about through confusing the two kinds of truth telling: the declaration of opinion and principle and the recounting of history.

He began to walk back. The crowd had cleared a little, to swell again no doubt in a minute or two when the planeload arriving from Rome came through. He could make out several dark-skinned people, men and women of African, West Indian, and Indian origin. Adam had not always been a racist, but he was one now. He thought how remarkable it was that these people could afford to travel around Europe.

It changes, but in some lives change is a long time coming.

Her whole life would have been different. Her whole life had hung on whether or not a man walked down a garden path and slipped on ice. If he hadn't slipped, she would have married someone else, lived in different places, had different children, perhaps even been happy. It was a dreadful thought.

Insensitive people are powerful and the thoroughly thick-skinned are the most powerful. They make the best tyrants.

I lived in the present. That's supposed to be a good thing, you know, an ideal, according to modern psychology. Odd, because the truth is, one lives in the present when the past is too bad to remember and the future too dreadful to contemplate.

Without me, without me, Everyday's misery. But with me - am I wrong? No night is too long!

Our children, when young, are part of ourselves. When they grow up they are just other people.

His books distracted him for a while. They were like the aspirins you take when you've got a headache. They kill the pain for two hours and then it comes back.

Why do you always wear black?" She delighted me with her answer, the correct, the only, answer. "I'm in mourning for my life. I'm unhappy.

Empty minds are abhorred by thought as vacuums are by nature.

Love is about allowing. Love is about letting people be free. You leave the cage door open and if you're really loved, the bird flies back to be with you. That's the only kind of love worth having.

The safest way to live is first, inherit money, second be born without a taste for liquor, third, have a legitimate job that keeps you busy, fourth, marry a wife who will cooperate in your sexual peculiarities, fifth, join some big church, sixth, don't live too long.

Evil was a stupid word. It had the same sort of sense, largely meaningless, amorphous, diffuse, wooly, as applied to "love." Everyone had a vague idea of what it meant but none could precisely have defined it. It seemed, in a way, to imply something supernatural.