Do you fancy coming back to my French Plait for a bevi? Stinging Nettle. Give us a slice of that Omar. Bonnie and Clyde. Bit parky outside - best put on me Titfer. Aunt Mabel. Your 'avin a Jimmy. Nigel Mansell. I'm desperate for a Patrick.
The Sea, the Sea — Iris Murdoch
The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.
Hotel Du Lac — Anita Brookner
I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together.
Mabel (podcast) — Juniper
“Sometimes I think I would eat you if I could. There is a witch in a story who ate a girl she loved, and always afterwards when she spoke, flowers fell out of her open mouth. I would swallow you up, and you would be lobelia on my tongue for the rest of my life. This is what they say: it is not uncommon for us to want to eat what we love.”
Gilead — Marilynne Robinson
Love is holy because it is like grace — the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
The Sea — John Banville
Her hands. Her eyes. Her bitten fingernails. All this I remember, intensely remember, yet all is disparate, I cannot assemble it into a unity. Try as I may, pretend as I may, I am unable to conjure her […] She wavers before my memory’s eye at a fixed distance, always just beyond focus, moving backward at exactly the same rate as I am moving forward.
Galatea — Madeline Miller
The door closed, and the room swelled around me like a bruise. When she was here, I could pretend it felt small because of her, but when she left the four wood walls seemed to press towards me, like lungs that had breathed in. The window did not help, for it was too high to see from the bed and too small to take in much air. The room smelled sweet and sour at once, as though a thousand suffering people had lain sweating in it, which I suppose they had, and then ground roses into the floor with dirty feet.
Galatea — Madeline Miller
He wondered at the marks on me, the red around my neck, and the purple on my arms and chest where he had gripped me. He rubbed at them, as though they were stains, not bruises. “The color is perfect,” he said, “look.” And he held up the mirror so I could see. “You make the rarest canvas, love.
