Quotes from Rose Tremain

Sessizce, Cambazlar bir kez ipin üzerinde dengede durdular m?, kalabal?k yaln?zca onlar?n düÅŸmelerini bekler, dedi.

But such are our days. Such are the days and times of Every Man and, no matter how hard we work and strive, we can never know when something shall be given to us and when it will be taken away.

And he thinks, God only knows exactly what that was, but it felt like my heart shouting. Some

something, but she slept on, unmoving. There was more – plenty more – that he could have said, but he knew that the time for saying it was long past.

towards Irma, seemingly burning or giving away every last item that had belonged to him?

He wanted to say, The person I love most in the world is about to leave me forever, but he knew these words were impossible to utter.

I have been held in an embrace so strong by the journey that I find I have relinquished the will to arrive.

For it did seem to be the case, she reflected, that the owners of art galleries were very frequently men who were unable to use ordinary language with any precision and who walked about in a horrible blizzard of peculiar superlatives and meaningless coinages from which they tried to shelter themselves by a wild flailing of their hands.

All life, he thought as he tugged at the boulder, is a flight from mistake to mistake.

She thought how, here and there in the world, often hidden away in some alley or winding street which few people ever trod, there were small yet wonderful oases of human dedication and kindness of spirit. This gladdened her particularly because she had seen it and not let it pass her by.

So then Joseph knew that he had no idea how to escape from the darkness closing round him, unless it might be to engineer his own death,...

and Pao Yi was reminded that the inclination of almost every living thing is to cling on, to remain where it is, but that his own inclination -his own nature- suspended him always in a kind of no-man's-land between remaining and leaving.

I felt urgently in need of some spiritual comfort, and began, at about this time, to send out messages to God. I imagined these feeble communications as minute blips of light, little wriggling glow worms which, unless God had a telescope pointed directly at them, he would be unlikely to notice.

Why did the fire not consume me? Why is suffering so arbitrary? If God exists, He is surely cruel. He is the old and terrible God of Moses, the God of Abraham. But the most logical conclusion is that He does not exist at all.

While he lived, I wished to say to Rosie, you scarcely had a gentle word for him and lived in fear of his drunken rages and other cruelties. But I did not remark out loud upon this, only noting privately to myself that death can work most extraordinary changes to a person's reputation and all that we have wished someone to be while they lived, they become, the moment they are dead.

Hope is a strange commodity. It is an opiate. We swear we have relinquished it and, lo, here comes a day when, all unannounced, our enslavement to it returns.

He appeared to Gustav like a caricature of a reserved English gentleman, with brilliantined white hair, a rosy complexion and a ridiculous little moustache, trimmed so close to his top lip, it resembled a worn-out nail brush.

River on the ferry, Billy swam beside it, and Harriet remembered the donkey and the donkey cart of her first

Wasting time changes the nature of time.

He appears to Paul like an old man, choking up with half-remembered things, as though there were a great struggle going on inside him to find, in among all that was half-remembered, those moments which had been absolute and true.

I am not in search of friends and confidences. I'm concentrating on being. I live each hour, one by one. My mind is quiet and still. I am no longer waiting for time to pass

A man can travel too far from his point of departure and become lost and never find his way back. All that remains to him then is to keep moving forward and pray that hope does not desert him too.

She thought that perhaps what she longed to hear was that almost every life was arranged like this, around a void where love should have been and was not, and that her predicament was therefore an ordinary one.

For what's the point in thinking about an end to your present sorrows, when you're a prisoner of events, a prisoner of time.