Favorite Quotes:
It was a long time before they told him about the war, and that involved an enormous amount of historical explanation. What seemed odd to him, he found, was not what seemed odd to other people...the fact that we were at war with Italy shook him like an inexplicable catastrophe of nature. "Italy," he exclaimed. Why, Italy was where two of his maiden aunts went every year to paint. He remembered too the Primitives in the National Gallery and Caporetto and Garibaldi, who had given a name to a biscuit, and Thomas Cook's. Then Johns patiently explained about Mussolini.
Ha ha ha.
When he thought of her it was with an absurd breathlessness. It was as if he were waiting again years ago outside...and the girl he loved was coming down the street, and the night was full of pain and beauty and despair because one knew one was too young for anything to come of this...
"Is life really like this?" Rowe asked. Mr. Prentice leant forward with an interested air, as though he were always ready to abandon the particular in favour of the general argument. He said, "This is life, so I suppose one can say it's like life."
Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done; it isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.
She looked at him with a kind of middle-aged tenderness, as though they'd grown through love into its later stage.
