The Secret Keeper

It's a terrible thing, isn't it, the way we throw people away?

A true friend is a light in the dark. Viven

Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse.

What could be more perfect than marrying the person you love.

Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.

Gerry?' Laurel had to strain to hear thought the noise on the other end of the line. 'Gerry? Where are you?' 'London. A phone booth on Fleet Street.' 'The city still has working phone booths?' 'It would appear so. Unless this is the Tardis, in which case I'm in serious trouble.

She was the sort of person who needed to be kept happy, he realized. Not as a matter of selfish expectation, but as a simple fact of design; like a piano or a harp, she'd been made to function best at a certain tuning.

Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.

But it is human, is it not, to long for that from which we are barred?

... people who'd led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.

Curiosity might have killed the cat, but little girls usually fared much better.

One of the things I have come to know most surely in my work is that the belief system acquired in childhood is never fully escaped; it may submerge itself for a while, but it always returns in times of need to lay claim to the soul it shaped.

It is queer, but my love and longing for the world are always deepened by my absence from it; it's wondrous, don't you think, that a person can swing from despair to gleeful hunger, and that even during these dark days there is happiness to be found in the smallest things?

To be faced with danger and find oneself fearless was thrilling.

And as the train whistled its imminent departure, a small girl wearing neat plaits and someone else's shoes climbed its iron stairs. Smoke filled the platform, people waved and hollered, a stray dog ran barking through the crowds. Nobody noticed as the little girl stepped over the shadowed threshold; not even Aunt Ada, who some might've expected to be sheperherding her orphaned niece towards her uncertain future. And so, when the essence of light and life that had been Vivien Longmeyer contracted itself for safekeeping and disappeared deep inside her, the world kept moving and nobody saw it happen.

Love, Laurel, that's the only reason to get married. For love.

There were moments in which a person reached a crossroads, when something happened, out of the blue, to change the course of life's events.

It was safe to say that neither had ever known the other sort of love, the sort with fireworks and racing hearts and physical desires.

... That was were the real people were found, hiding behind their black spots.

. . . companions were to be valued, wherever one found them.

There was something about a book that inspired dedication and a swelling desire to possess it.

people change as they get older....grow wiser, make better decisions...i am very old,Laurel. Anyone who lives as long as I have can't help but collect regrets along the way....things they did in the past...things they wish they'd done differently.

...how ugly adults could be, how weak. So used to getting what they wanted that they didn't know the first thing about being brave.

Laurel wondered whether perhaps a person reached an age when so much was kept from them, so many details of life discussed and decided elsewhere,misheard or misunderstood, that to be surprised was no longer disconcerting.

...and time thickened so that the seconds passed like years.

People aren't daft, . . . give 'em a bit of love and they'll never stray.

She deserved a man who could offer her the best of everything, not a lifetime of butcher's leftovers got on the cheap and a drop of condensed milk in her tea when they couldn't stretch to sugar. Jimmy was working hard to become that man, and as soon as he did, by God, he was going to marry her and never let her go.

All very well for a dull sort of girl to hitch her wheel to a man's wagon, but consider yourself warned, men enjoy a bit of sport, and they all like to catch the brightest prize, but once they do? That's when the fun and games end. His games, her fun.