Esme Lennox Quotes

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

She walks slowly. She wants to feel the prick, the push of every bit of gravel under her shoe. She wants to feel every scratch, every discomfort of this....her leaving walk.

We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

It was always the meaningless tasks that endure: the washing, the cooing, the clearing, the cleaning. Never anything majestic or significant, just the tiny rituals that hold together the seams of human life.

Two women in a room. One seated, one standing

Her grandmother keeps announcing that Esme will never find a husband if she doesn't change her ways. Yesterday, when she said it at breakfast, Esme replied "Good" and was sent to finish her meal in the kitchen.

The dress bunched up like loose skin round her neck. It wouldn't behave, wouldn't act as if it was really hers. Wearing it was like being in a three legged race with someone you didn't like.

Oh,’ she burst out. ‘I hate this—I hate it.’ ‘What?’ ‘Just—this. I feel as though I’m waiting for something and I’m getting scared it might never come.

In an odd way, we no longer seemed like a family, just a collection of people living in different rooms.

and when I first saw him I thought I might dissolve, like sugar in water.

What do you think, Father said, and I said, she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and she was, she was—

—doctor called me Mrs Lockhart and he said, what provisions have your family made for when she comes home? For her and the baby?

And she holds the photograph. She holds it in her hands. She looks at it and she knows.

ear, ‘did you know that two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people?

couldn’t have my happiness made out of a wrong—an unfairness—to somebody else . . . What sort of a life could we build on such foundations? —EDITH WHARTON

doctor called me Mrs Lockhart and he said, what provisions have your family made for when she comes home? For her and the baby?

Kitty and Esme. Esme and Kitty. Chances all ruined. Wouldn’t let go of the baby. Mine all along but I know that you did. ‘I think I don’t know.

What if, she always thinks. She has spent her life half strangled by what-ifs.

—terribly cold, I am. Terribly. I have to say I am not entirely sure where I am. But I don’t want anyone to know this so I shall sit tight and perhaps someone will—

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over.

And she asks how the weather is today in Brisbane.

Firth of Forth.

That a man used to be able to admit his daughter or wife to an asylum with just a signature from a GP.

The laughter. Erupting behind her during lessons, following her like a dress train as she walked down a corridor. Esme could never really tell why, what it was about her that afforded them such hilarity.

And Esme sees what might be. She shuts her mouth, closes her throat, folds her hands over each other and she does the thing she has perfected. Her speciality. To absent yourself, to make yourself vanish.

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We bein in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass; we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

Life can have odd confluences. Esme will not say serendipity: she loathes the word. But sometimes she thinks there must be something at work, some impulse, some collision of forces, some kinks in chronology.

Tots nosaltres, pensa l'Esme, no som més que recipients a través dels quals passen les identitats: tenim faccions, gestos, costums manllevats i després els transmetem. Res no és pròpiament nostre. Quan venim al món som anagrames dels antecessors.

Will you listen to yourself, she said to him, and added, eejit, just loud enough for him to hear. When I looked back at him I saw that he was looking at her, I saw the way it was, that he might dissolve like sugar in water, and when I saw this I—

She shuts her mouth, closes her throat, folds her hands over each other and she does the thing she has perfected. Her speciality. To absent yourself, to make yourself vanish. Ladies and gentlemen, behold. It is most important to keep yourself very still.

Mother and Father had said one night, just before my wedding, that her name would not be mentioned again and that they would thank me if I would act accordingly. And I did, act accordingly, that is, although I thought about her a great deal more than they realised. So I pulled out the letters and—

The paraphernalia is astounding. They are girls who have spent their lives in nothing more than a cotton dress, and here are liberty bodices, vests, stockings, socks, skirts, underskirts, kilts, Fair Isle sweaters, blouses, hats, scarves, coats, gaberdines, all, seemingly, intended to be worn at once.

And there is a soreness to her body, it aches, her head feels softened, muzzy. She has acquired a disturbingly acute sense of smell. The odour of print from a magazine someone is reading across a room can oppress her. She knows what will be on their plates at lunch just from sniffing the air. She can walk down the middle of the ward and can tell who has bathed this week and who has not.

Esme holds the cushion between both hands. Its fabric—a textured damask in a deep burgundy—is packed tight with foam stuffing. It has gold piping at its edges. She turns it over, then turns it back. She takes two steps across her sister’s room and she places it back on the sofa. She does this carefully, propping it against its twin, making sure it looks exactly as it did when she found it.

This girl is remarkable to her. She is a marvel. From all her family—her and Kitty and Hugo and all the other babies and her parents—from all of them, there is only this girl. She is the only one left. They have all narrowed down to this black-haired girl sitting on the sand, who has no idea that her hands and her eyes and the tilt of her head and the fall of her hair belong to Esme’s mother. We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

This girl is remarkable to her. She is a marvel. From all her family — her and Kitty and Hugo and all the other babies and her parents — from all of them, there is only this girl. She is the only one left. They have all narrowed down to this black-haired girl sitting on the sand, who has no idea that her hands and her eyes and the tilt of her head and the fall of her hair belong to Esme's mother. We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold. It is most important to keep yourself very still. Even breathing can remind them that you are there, so only very short, very shallow breaths. Just enough to stay alive. And no more. Then you must think yourself long. This is the tricky bit. Think yourself stretched and thin, beaten to transparency. Concentrate. Really concentrate. You need to attain a state so that your being, the bit of you that makes you what you are, that makes you stand out, three-dimensional in a room, can flow out from the top of your head, until, ladies and gentlemen, until it comes to pass that—

Dr Naysmith peers at something in his notes. ‘You insisted clothes that belonged to you weren’t yours, a school blazer in particular,’ he reads, in a monotone, ‘you claimed to see yourself sitting on a rug with your family when you were, in fact, at some distance from them.’ Esme looks at the doctor’s lips. They stop moving and close over his teeth. She looks down at the file before him. The room seems to have very little air in it: she is having to breathe down to the bottom of her lungs and she is still not getting enough. The bones of her head feel tight, constricted, and the tremor has seized her limbs again. It is as if this doctor has peeled back her skin and peered inside her. How can he possibly know about that when the only person she told was— ‘How did you know that?’ She hears her voice waver, rise at the end of the sentence and she tells herself, watch it, be careful, be very careful. ‘How did you hear about those things?’ ‘That is not the question. The question, is it not, is whether you still experience these hallucinations?’ She digs her nails into the flesh of her thighs; she blinks to clear her head. ‘No, Doctor,’ she says. Dr Naysmith writes furiously in his notes and there must be something in what she says because, at the end of the appointment, he leans back in his chair, fingertips resting together in a cage. ‘Very good, young lady,’ he intones. ‘How should you like to go home soon?

The Books Lucia’s birthday gifts for September 1st: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle and Peter Pan and Wendy by J. M. Barrie 2nd: Burglar Bill by Janet and Allan Ahlberg 3rd: Dogger by Shirley Hughes 4th: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll 5th: Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter 6th: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame 7th: The Borrowers by Mary Norton 8th: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett 9th: Black Beauty by Anna Sewell 10th: Matilda by Roald Dahl 11th: Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott 12th: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 13th: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë 14th: Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman 15th: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters 16th: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen 17th: Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson 18th: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman 19th: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri 20th: Passing by Nella Larsen 21st: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë 22nd: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood 23rd: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell 24th: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie 25th: The Other Side of the Story by Marian Keyes 26th: Atonement by Ian McEwan 27th: Small Island by Andrea Levy 28th: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 29th: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson 30th: Harvest by Jim Crace 31st: A Secret Garden by Katie Fforde 32nd: Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel From Lucia’s life Bird at My Window by Rosa Guy Of Love and Dust by Ernest J. Gaines Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle The Owl Service by Alan Garner The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault Story of O by Pauline Réage Illustrated Peter Pan by Arthur Rackham Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J. M. Barrie Marina’s recommendation Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder The book club at September’s house The Color Purple by Alice Walker Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Silas Marner by George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss also mentioned) Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith The book club’s birthday books for September’s 34th birthday Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters We Are Displaced by Malala Yousafzai To Sir, With Love by E. R. Braithwaite Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton Ready Player One by Ernest Cline Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson