Linda Gillard Quotes

I had to ask myself, why I was sensing a twinge of something that felt suspiciously like nostalgia. But starlight can do that to a person.

Faced with the daunting prospect of a party at which both my ex-husband and my ex-lover would be present with their much younger fiancées, I did what any woman would do in such an emergency. I shopped.

As I stared out of the train window, the scenery became a blur, as unclear as my thoughts and feelings.

I am an anomaly - a woman alone, too young to be widowed and too old to be looking for a mate. I occupy that no man's land - no woman's land - between youth and old age.

You're like a box of chocolates with the menu missing - the card that tells you what they are. I never know what I'm going to get with you: a soft, creamy centre, something chewy, or an explosion of alcohol.

I am safe. For one night at least. Safe, moored to this man.

I poured myself another glass of wine (white, now warm and disgusting, but I was in a masochistic mood)

Em's the first woman I've met who seems to be...well, the answer.' 'Answer to what?' He shrugged. 'All the questions, I suppose.' Fay looked blank. 'The questions you ask yourself at 4:00am... All the questions you'll ever ask yourself at 4:00am

That's what we do. Embellish. Decorate. Unvarnished truth has only limited appeal. Some events are a joy to recall, but others are best modified, even forgotten. They live in some lumber-room of the mind, housed somewhere you wouldn't want to go alone and never after dark. If I make a mistake in my work or if I change my mind, I can unpick. Undo what I've done. I can make good my errors and no one is the wiser. If they looked, even through a magnifying glass, all observers would see would be the tiny holes where my needle had travelled. I can erase even that evidence by scratching carefully at the weave of the lining with my needle, until the holes are no longer visible. But life isn't like that. Mistakes once made are rarely reversible. The holes they leave in the fabric of life aren't tiny and they can't be scratched away. You have to live with them as best you can. Work round them. That's why you have to come to terms with memory. You can't obliterate the past or eradicate it from the mind, even when, for our own good, memory enfolds us in a blanket of forgetfulness. There are always traces left, marks where time gripped us and left its telltale fingerprint.