Consequences

If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.

I have no idea where I am going, she thought, but I have begun.

And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not.

He felt marvellously conscious of the moment, of here and now, of this day.

They sat for several hours over a pot of tea and a plate of cake, and then they wandered the streets, impervious to time. By the end of the day, both realised that their lives had altered course.

It was as though she had some alter ego who told her she did not belong here. But she had never known anywhere else, and where else could there be?

Matt only knew that he was entirely happy, wholly in love, and that years of this rolled ahead, waiting for him.

Matt knew only that he must see her again, and forever.

He paused, looked thoughtfully at her over the cafe table. 'And do I seem unspeakably old?' She searched for an answer. 'Not old. Different. Like a book with more pages. Ones that I haven't read - and can't read.

It sometimes seemed to Molly that the library was a place of silent discord and anarchy, its superficial tranquillity concealing a babel of assertion and dispute. Fiction is one strident lie - or rather, many competing lies; history is a long narrative of argument and reassessment; travel shouts of self-promotion; biography is pushing a product. As for autobiography... And all this is just fine. That is the function of books: they offer a point of view, they offer many confliction points of view, they provoke thoughts, they provoke irritation and admiration and speculation. They take you out of yourself and put you down somewhere else from whence you never entirely return. If the library were to speak, Molly felt, if it were to speak with a thousand tongues, there would be a deep collective growl coming from the core collection up on the high shelves, where the voices of the nineteenth century would be setting new precedents, the bleats and cries of new opinion, new fashion, new style, The surface repose of a library is a cynical deception.

If reason ruled, you would not leave home in the morning, lest you stepped under a bus; you would not try, for fear of failure; you would not love, in case it hurt.

She cried in a way that she had never known, would not have thought possible, so that she was gasping; she shook; her tears were relentless; she felt that grief was scouring her, draining her empty.

But there’s the world snarling away, Hammond getting his leg blown off in Spain, and you can’t stay private. It’s…it’s intolerable.” “People have had to put up with it since forever. Nobody’s exempt from history. If our turn comes…well, it was ever thus. Anyway, it may not. Hitler’s a loudmouth. I prefer to think he’ll back off, like some people are saying.

Years later, she would think that you do not so much make decisions as stumble in a certain direction because something tells you that is the way you must go. You are impelled by some confusion of instinct, will, and blind faith. Reason does not come into it.