The English Wife

When you think about it, everything has been said before, in one way or another. It's only our experience of it that makes it new.

It wasn't the big decisions that set the course of one's life; it was the slow accretion of all the little ones.

It was very hard to rant while accepting a cup of tea.

It hurt to kill a dream, like tearing petals off a rose in full bloom.

The green-painted shutters had been closed over the windows, giving the house the look of a comfortable matron who had knotted off over her knitting.

I don't believe anything's really inevitable until it happens. We just call it inevitable to make ourselves feel better about it, to excuse ourselves for not having done anything.

She could feel herself pressing the details into memory, saving them like dried flowers kept in a spinster's chest, relics of a past that might have been, of a future that never was.

His look felt like a touch

Love is supposed to ennoble the soul, not degrade it.

She could only hold on to her husband with both hands and promise herself that the best way to keep someone was to let him go.

What a very odd thing,' said Janie, 'to live and leave no mark.