“Of course I'm not going to look through the keyhole. That's something only servants do. I'm going to hide in the bay window.”
― Penelope Farmer, quote from Charlotte Sometimes
“Where you some particular person because people recognized you as that?”
― Penelope Farmer, quote from Charlotte Sometimes
“And, she thought uncomfortably, what would happen if people did not recognize you? Would you know who you were yourself? If tomorrow they started to call her Vanessa or Janet or Elizabeth, would she know how to be, how to feel like, Charlotte? Were you some particular person only because people recognized you as that?”
― Penelope Farmer, quote from Charlotte Sometimes
“Charlotte was used to all the marks of war: the shabbiness of things, bad food, shop queues, posters about the war effort, people with worried faces, people dressed in black. She was used to seeing the wounded men from the hospital with their bright blue uniforms and bright red ties, the colours, she thought, if not the clothes of Arthur's soldiers. Such things did not disturb her, and the war seemed quite remote. But this disturbed her, the grotesque kind of circus that came now. It did not seem remote at all, nor did it fit with her vague ideas of war gained from those books of Arthur's she had read, with their flags and glory and brave drummer boys. How could you dare to become a soldier, knowing that you might end like this? There were men like clowns with white heads, white arms, white legs, men with crutches, slings, and bloodied bandages, and all so distressingly like men you would expect to see walking down the street, two armed, two legged, in hats instead of bandages and suits of black not battered khaki. Some came on stretchers borne by whole and ordinary men, some hobbled and leaned on whole ordinary arms. Most had mud dried thick across their clothes, and all came from the dark station's mouth with the spewings of trains behind, the clankings, thumpings, grindings, the sounds like great devils taking in breaths and blowing them out again.”
― Penelope Farmer, quote from Charlotte Sometimes
“Charlotte looked up doubtfully, wondering why, as she got older, she seemed to be more afraid of things, not less.”
― Penelope Farmer, quote from Charlotte Sometimes
“Even her footsteps did not seem to belong to her. The night seized and transformed them, just as it transformed the greenhouses they passed from useful places for growing things into cold night palaces.”
― Penelope Farmer, quote from Charlotte Sometimes
“But when she put her fingers into the water and pulled a marble out, it was small by comparison with those still in the glass, and unimportant, too. It was like the difference between what you long for and what you find--the difference, for instance, between Arthur's image of war and his experience of it. It was like other times, her own and Miss Agnes' proper childhood times that seemed so near to her memory and yet so far away. It was like everything that made you ache because in on sense it was so close and in another unobtainable.”
― Penelope Farmer, quote from Charlotte Sometimes
Penelope Farmer
Born place: in Westerham, Kent, The United Kingdom
Born date June 14, 1939
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“Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in vain) that the other holds the key to his puzzle.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Island of the Day Before
“Dear Jesus, please get me out. Christ, please, please, please, Christ. If you only keep me from being killed I'll do anything you say. I believe in you and I'll tell everybody in the world that you are the only thing that matters. Please, please, dear Jesus' The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rosa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from In Our Time
“And why would she do that?” Hadrian shouted to the upper story.
“She told you herself. Farlan was going to have the sheriff investigate.” “Yeah, investigate you!”
“But I didn’t kill anyone. Well, not anyone in Vernes … well, not recently.”
― Michael J. Sullivan, quote from The Crown Tower
“Wisdom is the power to admit that you cannot understand and judge the people in their entirety.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement
“I have learned the power of surviving.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
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