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.

Two women in a room. One seated, one standing

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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—

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—

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.

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.

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?