The Magic Toyshop Quotes
"There was very little Angie could not do: she drew very well, loved color, bold color, so that everything she created had something of the rainbow about them."
"The ideas behind the words she chose with such care and enthusiasm were just as important to her."
"'Pleasure has always had a bad press in Britain. I’m all for pleasure, too. I wish there was more of it around.'"
"She was the oracle and guide we all consulted, a listener whose eloquent silences kept us hanging on every word she quietly and wickedly uttered."
"Recognition was slow to come to her; she knew in her bones that her gender had something to do with that."
"Her writing has often been categorized as magic realism. Angela herself scorned this description, considering herself a stern realist."
"The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood. O, my America, my new found land."
"‘It is my fault,’ she told the cat. ‘It is my fault because I wore her dress. If I hadn’t spoiled her dress, everything would be all right. Oh, Mummy!’"
"Summer changed to autumn before she surfaced and lay palely on her bed, remembering."
"‘You must be a little mother to them,’ said Mrs Rundle."
"‘We keep a welcome for all,’ said Francie in his voice which creaked through lack of use."
"How beautiful to watch a small child sleeping!"
"Her arms were two hinged sticks, her mouth cool, dry and papery, her kiss inhibited, tight-lipped but somehow desperate, making an anguished plea for affection."
"Melanie cried a little because she was not tucked into her bed with the satin headboard and the striped coverlet."
"Dance music for some intricate, introspective, self-contained dancer."
"The music which was a lament for all lost and gone, loved things, an expression of a grief she had thought too deep to express."
"It did not so much reach a conclusion as slow down and dribble into silence, as though the players had got bored with the melody and let it slip through their fingers carelessly."
"She felt he was drawing his bow across her heartstrings."
"But water ran cold in the bathroom basin... she had to accept the fact that there was no hot water in the bathroom."
"There were still houses where there was no hot-water system or that a relative of hers might live in one."
"The plastic gums were hectically coloured a sunset pink."
"This was the harsh, unloving truth, the black, bitter bread of life."
"But there was no point in talking to Victoria, who had forgotten anywhere else because she lived from day to day."
"He moved as if he did not set his feet to the ground, so gracefully, so uncannily."
"She did not know whether to believe in him or not."
"But someone took him away. I often wonder where he went. He was probably glad to be away from her nagging."
"That's the way of it," said Finn philosophically. "He splashed her with the grey-green ocean of his eyes."
"Melanie felt a drop or two of moisture on her face – rain, maybe, or the coagulated damp of the wet night air, or spray from Finn’s regard."
"She could not move or speak. She waited in an agony of apprehension."
"‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said. ‘It is only poor Finn, who will do you no harm.’"
"‘Oh, get it over with, get it over with,’ she urged furiously under her breath."
"She wondered why he was doing this, putting his mouth on her own undesiring one, softly moving his body against her."
"‘My feet are wet,’ said Melanie. ‘Perhaps I shall catch a cold.’ Which will turn into pneumonia and I shall die and nobody will care."
"Is there something wrong with me that I felt such a blankness?"
"‘The dirty little beast,’ she said to herself. ‘Oh, what a little animal!’"
"I don’t know how I coped before you came. It is lovely to have another woman in the house."
"‘You are too young,’ he said. ‘No more false starts, as in the pleasure gardens, but the real beginning of a deep mystery between them.’"
"‘You see,’ he said, ‘he wanted me to fuck you.’"
"It seemed to warm her with more than wool, as if Mrs Rundle had purled and plained some of her love into it with every stitch."
"To her surprise, there was a special dinner, a roast goose, materialising unexpectedly on the table."
"These December days, Aunt Margaret’s pointed nose was always a little red at the tip."
"The house is full of toys and Uncle Philip won’t even give Victoria something she can play with quietly."
"‘This is my hand. Mine. But what is it for?’ she thought."
"Oh, I must not be afraid of the swan. It is all charades."
"She was covered completely by the swan but for her kicking feet and her screaming face."
"‘Everything is all right,’ said Finn. ‘The play is over.’"
"‘I had,’ she said slowly, reluctantly, ‘the strangest dream.’"
"‘It is incest,’ whispered Melanie. ‘Like the Kings and Queens of Ancient Egypt.’"