It's all a mystery

We welcomed Pops back this weekend. I'm not sure 10, 20, 40 years ago he could ever have imagined this journey.

'We never know what is going to happen, do we? Life is always throwing us this way and that. That's where the adventure is. Not knowing where you'll end up or how you'll fare. It's all a mystery, and when we say any different we're just lying to ourselves.' Eowyn Ivey The Snow Child

adventure

unseen, but certain

The final quote that I really liked, that in its way concludes the book.

'She had learnt to wait for the changes and the help that life brings. Life is like the sea, sometimes you are in the trough of the wave, sometimes on the crest, and always, trough or crest a mysterious tide bears you forward to an unseen, but certain shore.' Dorothy Whipple

sea

love and courage

Rachel mentioned that she'd be hosting a read along of Someone at a Distance in the second week of November and lo and behold I just happened to be reading that novel. Rachel will I'm sure write the most wonderful and thought provoking posts. So I shall mainly focus on favourite passages. There were two that really spoke to me, passages that stick with you and one hopes to remember and return to when needed.

'You must go on with love and courage... and trust to God to carry you forward through your life.'
.... 'I think the way to grow in faith is to behave as if all God's promises are true, and miraculously, you find that they are.' Dorothy Whipple Someone at a Distance

faith

a drop of dew

Whilst hanging out the washing early yesterday morning the sun was shining and the dew was glistening.

"The sun lights up a drop of dew

The drop of dew soon dries

You are the light of my eyes, my eyes

I'm brought to life by you..."

Laura Esquivel Like water for chocolate

light

Absolute Bliss

Even though we are no longer in our thirties I hope to still have moments like these...

"Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at - nothing - at nothing, simply.
What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss! - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and burned it in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe?..." Katherine Mansfield Bliss in Something childish but very natural

unknown

In fact I hope they continue forever...

Castles in the air part 2

Thank you for your thoughts on castles in the air - wonderful daydreams. In the final pages of Good Wives the theme of the sisters' castles in the air concludes.


"And yet your life is different from the one you pictured so long ago. Do you remember our castles in the air?" asked Amy
...
"Yes, I remember; but the life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely and cold to me now. I haven't given up the hope that I may write a good book yet, but I can wait, and I'm sure it will be all the better for such experiences... said Jo
...
"My castle was the realized of all. I asked for splendid things, to be sure, but in my heart I knew I should be satisfied, if I had a little home, and John, and some dear children like these." said Meg.


"My castle is very different to from what I planned, but I would not alter it, though, like Jo, I don't relinquish all my artistic hopes, or confine myself to helping others fulfil their dreams of beauty.

daydream

Perhaps our real life is better than our castles in the air.

Hamlet

Hamlet

The noise is stilled. I come out on the stage.

Leaning against the door-post

I try to guess from the distant echo

What is to happen in my lifetime.

The darkness of night is aimed at me

Along the sights of a thousand opera-glasses.

Abba. Father, if it be possible,

Let this cup pass from me.

I love your stubborn purpose,

I consent to play my part,

But now a different drama is being acted;

For this once let me be.

Yet the order of the acts is planned

And the end of the way inescapable.

I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy.

To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field*.

Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago

*The last line is a Russian proverb.

If one can have a favourite Good Friday passage this would be it.

Abba. Father, if it be possible,

Let this cup pass from me.

A dash of yellow

Let's brighten things up. Shake the possible January gloom away and think of flowers.
'Lady Slane liked them [his little offerings] best when they took the form of flowers... He would make daring and surprising combinations of colour and form, till the result was more like a still-life painting than like a bunch of living flowers, yet informed with a life that no paint could rival. Set upon their window-sill, luminous in the sun... he would produce a bunch as garish as a gipsy, all blue and purple and orange, but next week a bunch discreet as a pastel, all rose and grey with a dash of yellow..' Vita Sackville-West All Passion Spent

yellow

Oceans are moving

"A whole year passed, unremarkable, one of those periods of consolidation in change when one is growing and filling out into the spaces of a life the shape of which has been set but not yet seen: the time will come to stop shout, and look, up and around at the walls, the ceilings, the staircases leading from here to there, that one has built around oneself out of daily dabs of mud. Or the year was like a ship; inside it seems much the same town you have always lived in... But beneath the patterned carpet oceans are moving past your feet; and you yourself have determined this with a ticket you bought months back." Nadime Gordimer The Lying Days

For us 2011 definately wasn't like a ship - we knew we'd moved...
@
What was 2011 for you a staircase or a ship? And how would you like 2012 to be?

Frailty and Endurance

Sunday would have been Granny's birthday. I didn't manage to post this before she died but I think her final months expressed how true this quote is.

'...human can mean frailty and endurance both at the same time.' Irene Nemirovsky Suite Francaise
ballet

Eyes surfeited with beauty

I'm enjoying reading Ripening Seed by Colette for passages like this. Although it is making me want to be on holiday, by the coast, in France.

'An off-shore breeze wafted the scent of the new-mown after-crop, farmyard smells, and the fragrance of bruised mint: little by little, along the level of the sea a dusty pink was usurping the domain of blue unchallenged since the early morning. Phillippe did not know how to express such a thought as: 'All too few are the occasions in life when with mind content, eyes surfeited with beauty, heart light, retentive, and almost empty, there comes a moment for the senses to be filled to overflowing: I shall remember this as just such a moment.' Colette Ripening SeedWhat moments are you remembering this month?

I count it happiness

One of the readings Granny had asked to be read at her funeral.

I count it happiness-

Ere we go so quickly where we came

To gaze ungrieving on these majesties.

The world wide sun, the stars, water and clouds

And Fire. Live Parmeno, a hundred years

Or a few months, these you will always see

And never, never any greater things.

Think of this lifetime as a festival

Or visit to a strange city, full of noise

Buying and selling, theiving, dicing stalls and joy parks.

If you leave it early friends,

Why, think you have gone to find a better Inn.

You have paid your fare and leave no enemies.

Menander b.342 BC Athens

Great Uncle Henry

So today we're off to celebrate Great Uncle Henry's 100th birthday. He still lives by himself in the home he and his wife bought over fifty years ago in Bow, East London.

A quotation about how we change through life seems appropriate today.

..."there is no such thing as a coherent human personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be." Sebastian Faulks Charlotte Gray

we heart it

Happy Birthday Henry x

The Edible Woman

So after yesterday's quote from sixteen year old me. These two Virago quotes about how we change seem appropriate.

'It was one thing to be admired because one was lovely, and quite another thing to be admired because one was still so lovely. She did not belong to the sort of woman who, half-way through her life, can change her manner and inaugarate a new existence;' Vita Sackville-West The Edwardians 1930

'Whatever was going to happen to Clara had already happened: she had turned into what she was going to be... She only wanted to know what she was becoming, what direction she was taking, so she could be prepared.' Margaret Atwood The Edible Woman 1969

woman
I've mentioned before that many of the quotes I save refer to travelling through life. Do we stay the same, how do we change? I've changed alot since I was sixteen yet yesterday's quote still strikes a chord with me.
Virago, or indeed books in general, speak to the teenager, the young adult, the adult and journey with us as we mature and beyond.

Which Virago has travelled with you through your changing life?

Little Rays of Light

I think that this, apart from Jane Austen, was probably my first Virago. This quote is on page four of my original book of quotes, so probably around the time I was 16... This passage spoke to me then and speaks to me now...

'However dark things may seem little rays of light and understanding will break through. Perhaps this is all there will ever be, all we have the right to expect. But so long as we are open to receive them that is all that matters. Whatever happens we must never shrug our shoulders and say
"Well, I had such dreams and nothing came of them, but things haven't been so bad, I've got along somehow."
You must never do that to yourself. Delve into your despair and rage against it, rather than that. But never subscribe to the littleness of life.' Mary Hocking Welcome Strangers.

rays of light

Aren't Virago novels all about not 'subscribing to the littleness of life', whatever that may mean for our situation?

Ancestors

I felt we couldn't celebrate Black History Month without a quote from Chinua Achebe.

'The land of the living was not far removed from the domain of the ancestors. There was coming and going between them, especially at festivals and also when an old man died, because an old man was very close to the ancestors. A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.' Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

That Mad Ache

I knew from this opening paragraph that I would love this novel. I devoured it.

'She opened her eyes. A brisk little breeze had impudently slipped into the bedroom. Already it had turned the curtain into a sail and bent the flowers in their tall vase on the floor, and now it had set its sights on her sleep. It was a spring wind, the very first one, and it smelled of thickets, forests and soil; it had swept unchallenged through the faubourgs of Paris, through their streets choked with traffic fumes, and now it was arriving softly but brashly at dawn in her bedroom, intent on reminding her, even before she emerged from her drowsy state, of the pleasure of being alive.' Francoise Sagan That Mad Ache

It was the perfect warm summer's read. It's about love. It's about fear. It's about passion. It's about convention. It's about not wanting to grow up.

This is how I imagine Lucile to be.

@
This would be her bedroom.

@

Have you read it? How did it make you feel?

And if you haven't read it but like the opening passage? Do treat yourself.

Escape into another world.

One Fine Day

After our glorious sunny weekend it seems apt to be posting this today. When reading this novel the English summer seemed a life time away, but I almost felt like re reading it this weekend as the weather so fitted the weather of One fine Day. It's a short and sweet book which I really enjoyed and found uplifting.
The two words which come to mind when thinking about this book are 'daydreaming' and 'escaping'. Laura goes about her daily life reflecting and reminiscing. To a time before marriage and the war, to during the war, on their life today and to where they might go tomorrow. Laura is aware of her part in society and that her 'easier sort of life has come to an end.' She now has to look after their daughter, whom she dearly loves, shop, cook, wash up. These two passages show some of her feelings to her home.

'Now, said the house to Laura, we are alone together. Now I am yours again...She knew all her house's little voices as she had never done in the old days when there had been more people under her roof.'

'...my day is a feeble woman's day following a domestic chalk line, bound to the tyranny of my house with its voices saying, Clean me, polish me, save me from the spider...It is so long since I measured out a day for myself and said, This is mine, I shall be alone.'

As the story unravels the glimpse at the marriage of Laura and Stephen is touching - in the end I felt that they were right for each other. Her fondness for her daughter. At the end I had the feeling that things would be alright. They would manage. And that would because of their tight knit family unit of three.

My favourite sentence in the novel is about half way through. All the strain of the war and now keeping house means Laura feels she's aged and this is summed up so beautifully when Laura describes the handsome young whom she's asking to garden for them looking at her

'He looked at her amiably, as though she was a nice sofa... She had noticed it young men looked at you as though you were a nice sofa, an article of furniture which they would never be desirous of acquiring.'

source

Never mind when I am old I shall wear purple. When I am old I shall be a chaise longue...

The Jigsaw

'Life was a jigsaw, but if you tried to fit the pieces together yourself, you generally got them wrong... She had thought that was the pattern the pieces made. But it had been like trying to force two pieces together that didn't quite fit, and then, suddenly, the jigsaw had been done, in quite a different way, by other hands.' Monica Dickens Mariana

Endpaper from Mariana

Another quote that links to so many others about how we journey through life. Reading helps us make sense of life, explore other people's lifes for size and hopefully decide that ours is the best one for me right here, right now. Reading shows how throughout time, across generations and continents, we've been puzzling over the journey. The journey and opportunities will change but the puzzling won't.

7th April 2010

Dearest, If you're reading this, these are for you...
'When loved ones die, you have to live on their behalf. See things as though with their eyes. Remember how they used to say things, and use those words oneself. Be thankful that you can do things that they cannot, and also feel the sadness of it.' Louis de Bernieres Captain Correlli's Mandolin

'When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose them all at once; you lose them in pieces over a long time - the way the mail stops coming, and their scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in their closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of them that are gone. Just when the day comes - when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that they're gone forever - there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.' John Irving A prayer for Owen Meany

All love to you and know that I am here x