Her Fearful Symmetry Quotes
"The problem was located in the word how: he would live, but without Elspeth the flavour, the manner, the method of living were lost to him."
"The days of man are but as grass: for he flourisheth as a flower of the field."
"A bad thing about dying is that I’ve started to feel as though I’m being erased."
"I told you I would let you know-so here it is-goodbye."
"I wish you happiness, whatever you may choose to do."
"I didn’t leave you anything. You got to live my life. That’s enough."
"In the seconds before she died, Elspeth remembered a day last spring."
"She felt as though her soul were attempting to climb out by way of her oesophagus."
"His morning shower was a high point of his day."
"Elspeth was quite awful to her. The woman went off in a huff, and Elspeth had this rather puffed-up look about her, like one of those Brazilian frogs that get very large and spit at things that want to eat them."
"Robert sighed and thought about Elspeth’s dressing room, which doubled as an impromptu shoe museum."
"It’s the extravagance of the thing that appealed to her, you know."
"Only the two oldest boys were still doggedly hitting the balls through the hoops."
"She worried that if she went outside she would be dispersed by wind and weather."
"She could only feel warmth and coolness now."
"It was impossible to be rid of them. They were like a radio played at low volume in a neighbouring flat."
"Being a ghost was mostly like that: it forced her to feed off the world."
"I don’t know. What am I supposed to do while you’re doing that?"
"He’s insane and I understand him. But maybe he isn’t completely crazy."
"It’s a museum, in a sense, but it’s also a working Christian burial ground."
"Don’t be long," Jessica said. "You know we’re short-handed today."
"I thought she’d be sitting on your lap by now."
"What am I supposed to do while you’re doing that?"
"What do you mean you’re trapped in the flat?"
"I want privacy! I’m sick of being half a person."
"Don’t you think it’s time we started having our own lives?"
"WHAT IF YOU ENDED UP STUCK IN YOUR FLAT?"
"What is more basic than the need to be known? It is the entirety of intimacy, the elixir of love, this knowing."
"Elspeth laughed and flew back to Robert. SPIES, she wrote. COME BACK ANOTHER DAY."
"I wish I could stow them away somewhere while I frolic with Robert."
"If you think back, you had hinted or, actually, you’d said it more than once, that you were sending the twins here as a sort of substitute for yourself."
"I was watching television and they were interviewing a new cabinet minister-and it was my father."
"I suppose I ought to." Martin watched Robert setting out the tea things. "Really, though, I am taking it for Marijke."
"You’re very attractive, Julia." She stood still and looked at him, dubious. "But I love Marijke, and no one else will do."
"Valentina, it’s one thing to research the Victorians, it’s completely different when you unearth your own family skeletons."
"It’s as though I’m a cloud, and he’s expecting rain."
"We wanted the same thing, and we were never going to be apart... remember?"
"I want to go to school. I want to have a boyfriend, I want to get married and have kids."
"I made another garden, yea, For my new Love."
"What if the dead did know? What if they're all there, or somewhere…?"
"We need you to write what happened, and why it is significant."
"I've been talking to Elspeth. She’s in her flat and can’t leave."
"I think play must have been invented so we wouldn’t go mad thinking about certain things."
"I’ll never see her again. She’ll be unhinged. I don’t want to see her."
"That’s what Elspeth said, at first. But then she thought about it, and she worked out how we could do it."
"That was strangely easy. I always imagined bodysnatching to be a more strenuous occupation."
"I’m not quite right. I’ll have a drink when I get home."
"As though no time had passed, nothing has happened."
"Your lover should be what I was thirty years ago."
"Are you going to leave me for your new ghost?"
"You killed Elspeth, and then you killed Valentina."
"That’s okay. This is a plane full of Americans."