Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don't show him that he counts for something?

In the end I suppose we lay flowers on a grave because we cannot lay ourselves on it.

This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear

To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before. It was to know that if one were ever alone again, there would be no exemption from the agony of it. It wasn’t the happiest feeling.

It was an air one might still breathe, if everyone forgiven was brave.

I understand that your brain is large and perpetually at war with itself

The worst thing would be to decide that it was love, and then to discover - after one was taken - that it hadn't been. No: the worst thing would be to decide that it wasn't love, and then to discover years later - old and unconsoled - that it had been. No: the worst thing - the worst, worst thing - was this having to decide.

Stupid is you can’t learn, ignorant is you haven’t learned yet.

All the things we make exceptional are merely borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it.

London had always had this trick of living in two time signatures at once - the urgent and the always - each in earshot of the other.

Women fall differently, that's all. We die by the stopping of our hearts, they by the insistence of theirs.

Everything can be restored. If one won't believe that, how does one endure all this?

It turned out that the only difference between children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad.

One didn't understand, until one had seen a great many bodies, the unconscious effort that one must be making every minute simply to keep one's hands and face and clothes clean. The world's surfaces were so filthy that the living touched them only with the tips of their fingers and the soles of their shoes. How grubby it was to die, to give up making that effort.

Look at us, won't you? We are nation of glorious cowards, ready to battle any evil but our own.

Perhaps this was what it was to grow up: this realization that the world was already staffed with people and that one was not particularly needed. She

turned out that the only difference between children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad.

What’s he like?” “Thoughtful. Interesting. Compassionate.” “These are English words for ugly.

One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to.

This helpful war. It makes us better people and then it tries to kill us.

How lovely was each breath. How peculiar that one had never noticed.

I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season.

After the war of course it will be like the start of spring, which is always so brilliantly sudden. The leaves will burst back onto the trees and close the gaps between the branches and we shall be startled - shan't we? - s we are startled at the end of every winter. We shall think: oh, I had quite forgotten there were three livable seasons.

The true moments of one's life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronized with the ordinary: with rail timetables, with breaks in traffic.

They spoke of small things at first, since it was best, when reattaching threads, to begin with the easiest knots.

I don't know. We've never done anything, have we? We've no talent but conversation.

Her mother set to with the hairbrush again. “But would that be so awful, darling? To be the prettiest thing in Brimscombe-and-Thrupp?” “I should rather die.” “You nearly did.” “Yes, but I tend to blame the Germans.

Perhaps this was what love was like after all- not the lurch of going over a humpback bridge, and not the incandescence of fireworks, just the quiet understanding that one should take a kind hand when it was offered, before all light was gone from the sky.

In the history of the world there was not one example of a man ever having written a satisfactory letter to a woman who mattered to him.