

“So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages, as it haunted my life, goes down into the impenetrable gloom. Like a shadow she first came to me in the loneliness of the night. Like a shadow she passes away in the loneliness of the dead”
― The Woman in White
― The Woman in White

“There is a great deal in choosing colours that go well with one's complexion. People think of that for their dresses, but not for their rooms., which are of so much more importance. I should have liked blue, but blue gets so soon tawdry. I think, (...) that I have enough complexion at present to venture upon a pale spring green.”
― Miss Marjoribanks
― Miss Marjoribanks

“Dear Mrs Chiley," said Lucilla, "it doesn't matter in the least what you wear; there are only to be gentlemen, you, know, and one never dresses for gentlemen. (...) Their vanity is something dreadful-but it is one of my principles never to dress unless there are ladies.”
― Miss Marjoribanks
― Miss Marjoribanks

“...for it happens that books are the only article of property in which I am richer than my neighbors.”
― Confessions of an English Opium Eater
― Confessions of an English Opium Eater

“They had met one another, at first not very often, throughout the heady autumn of the first London air raids. Never had a season been more felt; one bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death. Out of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter; between the last of sunset and first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine. From the moment of waking you tasted the sweet autumn not less because of an acridity on the tongue and nostrils; and as the singed dust settled and smoke diluted you felt more and more called upon to observe daytime as a pure and curious holiday from fear. All through London the ropings-off of dangerous tracts of streets made islands of exalted if stricken silence, and people crowded against the ropes to admire the sunny emptiness on the other side. The diversion of traffic out of blocked main thoroughfares into byways, the unstopping phatasmagoric streaming of lorries, buses, vans, drays, taxis past modest windows and quiet doorways set up an overpowering sense of London’s organic power â€� somewhere there was a source from which heavy motion boiled, surged and, not to be damned up, force itself into new channels.”
― The Heat of the Day
― The Heat of the Day
Diana’s 2024 Year in Books
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