Salley Vickers Quotes

He was right because he had grasped the nature of mortality. He had a mind free enough and a heart bold enough to take on board, properly take on board, that just as there are first things so also - it is after all, if we could take it in, implicit - there are last things. That everything in human life tends towards its ending and that any meeting, however full of hope and promise, will be the first stage in a progress towards a last meeting - and that this may happen sooner than we imagine and without fair warning.

It is hard to account for the common human resistance to happiness, unless it is that we would rather be crippled by what we lack than risk the pain that is one potential consequence of placing our secret selves in others' hands ... to take delight in being loved requires nerve.
The Other Side of You

Age and disease and death may destroy our physical being but it is other people who get inside us and damage our hearts and minds.
The Other Side of You

You think I'm strong because I sound off and go on about things and am very direct and seem very full of myself ... but the truth is, I am much, much feebler than you. I just go on like this to keep my end up. You think what you're doing is right and that gives you strength. You see, I know I'm not right, I know there is no right. The only "right" I am is that I know what I like and what I want, and what I like and what I want is you, more than anyone else in all the world does, or could."
Thomas to Elizabeth "The Other Side of You

Then it was she saw him again. On the upper reaches of the scaffolding, a sheerness of presence, no more. It was as if he took the space from the air about him and against the darkness was etched, like the brightness which seeps through a door ajar, hinting at nameless, fathomless brilliances beyond, the slightest margin of light. Impossible to look too closely, but some way below, beneath where the long feet might have rested, she made out the girl's huddled shape, her arms folded over her head like some small broken-winged, storm-tossed bird.

Full revelation, she couldn't help feeling, was something which was considered a virtue only among the reckless or the cruel.

Is it true we'd rather be ruined than changed?

Guilt. Does anyone escape it? Is guilt the reason we make up stories?

Beware, beware of those who care,' as some wise person said. Not that I'm suggesting there is anything wrong with caring. But as Granny Maud used to say, 'Fine words butter no parsnips,' and she might have added, 'Caring should be felt and not heard.

That boy held my heart in a way that felt molecular.

The Abbe Paul looked at Agnes rather as Alain had, with respect. 'How sensible. People are desperate to probe mysteries which for the most part are best left unprobed. It is the modern curse: this demented drive to explain every blessed thing. Not everything can be explained. Nor should be, I think.

We all long for someone with whom we are able to share our peculiar burdens of being alive.