Deborah Lawrenson Quotes

I marveled at how they were all closed up, asleep with their secrets unseen until you reached up and took the book down from the shelf.

I have heard it said that a happy childhood is a curse, because what follows can never measure up. All I can say is, those people must want too much; they can't accept that life is a series of struggles and that happiness can be found in overcoming them, drawing strength from the reserves laid down in the good years.

I still dream in pictures and color, always the world of my childhood. I see the purple Judas trees at Easter lighting up the roadsides and terraces of the town. Ochre cliffs made of cinnamon powder. Autumn clouds rolling along the ground of the hills, and the patchwork of wet oak leaves on the grass. The shape of a rose petal. And my parents' faces, which will never grow any older.
"But it is strange how scent brings it all back too. I only have to smell certain aromas, and I am back in a certain place with a certain feeling."
The comforting past smelled of heliotrope and cherry and sweet almond biscuits: close-up smells, flowers you had to put your nose to as the sight faded from your eyes. The scents of that childhood past had already begun to slip away: Maman's apron with blotches of game stew; linen pressed with faded lavender; the sheep in the barn. The present, or what had so very recently been the present, was orange blossom infused with hope.

Sometimes you can tell all you need to know about a person just in the way they ask the question: politely, or with genuine curiosity, denoting a fine understanding of all it might reveal – from a rich inner life to a point of compatibility between strangers.

When I as reading and writing, I was in that exhilarating place where the life of the imagination is more real than the tiles and soil and rock under my feet.

The sun was setting behind a line of trees; it cast a great bird's wing halfway across the field when she finally headed back towards the house. In the warm shade of the first enclosed garden, the datura plants were already releasing pulses of their heady night scent. The coffee aroma of earlier was now a burnt chocolate and earthy spice smell that would deepen with the night. Ellie felt a burning sensation in her nose, like mustard.

Scrubby evergreen bushes released a strong scent of resin and honey; forests of pine gave way to gentle south-facing vineyards disturbed only by the ululation of early summer cicadas. Sitting up tall on the seat, she craned around eagerly to see what plants thrived naturally.
It was a wild and romantic place, Laurent de Fayols had written, the whole island once bought as a wedding gift to his wife by a man who had made his fortune in the silver mines of Mexico. One of three small specks in the Mediterranean known as the Golden Isles, after the oranges, lemons, and grapefruit that glowed like lamps in their citrus groves.
There were few reference works in English that offered information beyond superficial facts about the island, and those she had managed to find were old. The best had been published in 1880, by a journalist called Adolphe Smith. Ellie had been struck by the loveliness of his "description of the most Southern Point of the French Riviera":


'The island is divided into seven ranges of small hills, and in the numerous valleys thus created are walks sheltered from every wind, where the umbrella pines throw their deep shade over the path and mingle their balsamic odor with the scent of the thyme, myrtle and the tamarisk.

Even as winter comes, mornings are crisp, and the big, blue sky seems to hang newly washed over the sea of hills.

The flat area immediately below was broken up into a formal pattern of beds containing oleander and more clipped clouds of box, a southern imitation of the grand parterres of aristocratic chateaux. A rose garden beyond was the first in a series of gardens created on descending levels, apparently linked by a magnificently overgrown wisteria. Dense lines of cypress hid any farther areas from view, including the memorial garden that was her special brief. As a whole, the garden was charming, luxuriant, but- from a professional point of view- dilapidated.

Some scents sparkle and then quickly disappear, like the effervescence of ctirus zestor a bright note of mint.

I sometimes wonder how much of our life is rooted in the imagination, in the stories we tell ourselves and others in order to make sense of what has happened along the way.

In the early days of a relationship, we all pretend to be something we are not. It might be as simple as pretending to be more outgoing than we really are, or more tolerant, or feigning cool when we feel anything but. There are infinitely subtle grades of pretense.