Night Music Quotes
"Animals and humans were no different, he thought wryly, when it came to staking their claim."
"If I do one thing, I may break their hearts. If I do the other, I’ll certainly break my own."
"There was no dressing it up. It should sound as bald, as hard, as it was."
"She was wondering, briefly, whether it was possible to kill someone with a kitchen tray and a dessert spoon."
"Sometimes there was more pleasure in knowing you could have something than actually having it."
"This house is like us. It has been bereft, abandoned. Now it will look after us, and we will bring it back to life."
"We are here, and we are together. That is what is important."
"I think they’re meant to heat the whole house." - Isabel
"You’d never have done that if Mary was here." - Kitty
"I need to make this into a home, a place that is not dominated by what is missing." - Isabel
"I will come up here and play for you. A requiem to the things we have both lost." - Isabel
"There’s always another property." - Nicholas Trent
"I didn’t sign up to this, I did not sign up to bankruptcy." - Diana
"It will be our home if we make it so." - Isabel
"Tell you what – I’ll call a plumber and we’ll get the hot-water system sorted." - Isabel
"You need to think seriously about how much money you’re willing to put into it." - Matt McCarthy
"He says it will be ours in the end, that's all I have to keep in mind."
"I can't say that. I don't trust him any more than you do, but it's none of our business."
"What's the matter? Kitty, what on earth's got into you?"
"It's not hard to skin a rabbit. Thierry's done it."
"They're not cute fluffy bunnies, they're food for my children."
"She and Thierry went to bed without protest, which was disturbing in itself."
"She built up the log fire, drank half a bottle of red wine too quickly."
"There was nothing he liked less than a desperate woman who couldn’t get the message."
"Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw Byron’s face as he looked at Isabel."
"A few minutes later he heard sobbing. 'Bloody house,' she was yelling. 'Bloody stupid house.'"
"Her whole body ached with loneliness, the loss of her husband, the rough communion with a man who wasn’t him."
"She thought of Laurent! What have you brought me to? What have I become?"
"Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?"
"Everything we said after that night – it’s all been a stupid mistake."
"I never thought of myself as a predator before."
"When you’re out here at daybreak you can pretend you’re the only person in the world."
"A lorry crossed the central reservation and hit him head on. He wouldn’t have known a thing."
"You’re amazing, Laura. You’re smart and kind and you deserve so much more."
"Sometimes the only way is to cut out the dead wood entirely."
"She was glad that the children no longer wanted to return to London: the house in Maida Vale had morphed overnight from a lost idyll, a comforting home, to a place of deception, of secrets."
"She was no longer sure what made a home. Any further than it was about two quietly sleeping bodies upstairs."
"He had lost weight, but suspected it was due less to his having to forage than to his lack of appetite."
"When Byron thought of Isabel being afraid of him, of her family believing he could do them harm, something heavy fell upon him like a shroud."
"I should not have challenged Matt, he told himself, for the hundredth time. I should have kept my mouth shut. But he didn’t believe it."
"She didn’t know what she would say, although she had rehearsed a hundred arguments, a thousand pithy put-downs."
"And then the ringing stopped, and a woman’s voice – well spoken, unremarkable, probably not that different from her own – said, ‘Hello?’"
"She went to Thierry’s room. He was in bed now, the dog on the duvet. She would not scold him: if it made him happy, a few muddy footprints were a fair price to pay."
"It’s complicated. With my son and everything."
"It was the first time it had rained and nothing had leaked, and Isabel, who no longer took such things for granted, considered that a small miracle."
"She wished he was there. She felt certain of everything when he was with her, when she felt his hands on hers and could see the sincerity in his face."
"‘I’m not pressuring you but—’ ‘I will decide, Nicholas.’"
"‘But it was an accident. Really.’ She heard the pain in his voice."
"Nothing is the same after something like that, Isabel. Nothing. It’s not just the guilt. It’s the shape of things. The shape of yourself."
"You were lucky or you were not. You died or you did not."
"You can choose to be happy or you could not."
"Everyone needs a bit of space, and Byron more than most."
"I have been apologising for trespassing on land that was mine."
"That’s my asking price. As you say, Mr Trent, it’s a very special setting."