Quotes About Reflection

Age can mellow, they say.' 'They say wrong,' said Diccon Chancellor. 'I have known Mistress Philippa these two months, and I have aged while she has grown daily less mellow. Why else am I fleeing the country?

I'm sorry,' said Jerott, his eyes elsewhere. What was the attraction here, in God's name? Not the little woman in the stained gown, surely? Or the plain fourteen-year-old who had been so courageous the night Trotty died?

I am too far away now from it all,' Lymond said. 'And if we are going to be metaphysical, I have no sea card, or compass, or star.

There is a Russian proverb,' Nepeja said. 'Beat your shuba, and it will be warmer; beat your wife and she shall be sweeter.' There was a brief silence, while his hearers considered the analogy. 'Beat your brother and he shall be deader?' at length Danny said.

Considering Lymond, flat now on the bed in wordless communion with the ceiling, Richard spoke. My dear, you are only a boy. You have all your life still before you. On the tortoise-shell bed, his brother did not move. But there was no irony for once in his voice when he answered. Oh, yes, I know. The popular question is, For what?

I hope,' said Jerott, breathing softly and hard, 'that you never meet those who will judge what you have done. How would you recognize love? Or compassion? Francis at least has learned that.

I see,' said Jerott slowly. 'You've thought it all out.' 'That's what I do,' said Lymond. 'I sit on my brood-patch and think.

His hair soft as a nestling's, his eyes graceless with malice, Lymond was watching him in a silver mirror.

You need bed and a hot drink and a little less fluent self-pity.

We?' said Chancellor. 'I am lavishly paid,' Danny said, 'to think in the first person plural.

Why?' said Philippa. 'For suffering what you have suffered for three months?' And felt the veils rend about her, for she had broken the unwritten law: it must not be uttered. It must not be uttered, or they could not bear the pain, mirrored over and over.

I have fallen out of the habit of talking to brothers,' Lymond said.

You were right. I should really never have gone back to Jerott. Intolerance drunk is bad enough, but intolerance sober is quite insupportable.

Why are you here?" Silence. Then the boy said slowly, "Because I admire you.

Are you mourning? Seneca says a wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can. You should be pleased. At last Francis has managed to follow his own misguided path without the rest of us consuming time and energy on setting him right.

I think you might come to forget, too, that life is more than a science.

But you loved my father,' he said. 'And Eloise's, of course. What was he like?' 'Like you,' Sybilla said. 'And worth all this?' Lymond said. 'Yes,' said Sybilla. 'Don't you, of all people, know what love can do?

I find your family, my dear Marthe, much more disturbing than mine.

And for Adam Blacklock the artist, older, wiser, and perhaps less vulnerable than once he had been, a chance to assess from maturity a person whose maturity was and always had been a thing disconcerting to witness. For what, after these violent years, would entertain or even interest Francis Crawford, Blacklock found he had no idea.

I sometimes wonder," said Francis Crawford, "if I only exist to be sacrificed to." Her heart beating strongly, she watched him. "Perhaps," she said. "But if you accept sacrifices, you must respond with acts of reparation.

Your right to die? They accept that already. It is I," said Sybilla, "who do not.

It was hard to say therefore why he did not go below, and rally his brother, and encourage him to let the past fade, and look forward to what lay before him. Unless, in his heart of hearts he recognized as Lymond did that what lay around him were shut gates; and what lay before him was nothing.

He said something, and became aware that he was expected to leave. He felt like a dog, he thought, whose master had died. He left the house, but did not remember the journey to Fenchurch Street.

And Richard was silent, for the truth Jerott had seen touched him, too, for a moment before he thrust it aside. He said, instead, 'Once, I returned, by mistake, a present you gave me.' As when he had come in, fresh from the wind, surprise and pleasure roused, for an instant, all the colour in his brother's face. Francis Crawford said, 'I have kept it, in case one day you might want it. If you do … It makes worthwhile this part, at least, of the journey.