Instructions For A Heatwave Quotes

Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager?

She sits there and feels the loneliness and the lack of him

Gretta sits herself down at the table. Robert has arranged everything she needs: a plate, a knife, a bowl with a spoon, a pat of butter, a jar of jam. It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved.

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

The previous day and the day yet to come hang in a balance, each waiting for the other to make a move.

Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager? Is this retrogression cumulative? Will she continue to lose a decade a day?

She hadn’t ever wanted children and yet she had. She had and she did

Never chase a man, her mother had told her. No good will come of it.

Odd that your life can contain such significant tripwires to your future and, even while you wander through them, you have no idea.

Strange weather brings out strange behavior. As a Bunsen burner applied to a crucible will bring about an exchange of electrons, the division of some compounds and the unification of others, so a heatwave will act upon people. It lays them bare, it wears down their guard. They start behaving not unusually but unguardedly. They act not so much out of character but deep within it.

What he finds hardest about family life is that, just when you think you have a handle on what’s going on, everything changes.

They have been together for so many years that they are no longer like two people but one strange four-legged creature. For her, so much of their marriage is about talk: she likes to talk, he likes to listen. Without him, she has no one to whom she can address her remarks, her observations, her running commentary about life in general.

She doesn't like sitting about, no matter what is wrong in life. It does you good to have something ahead of you, regardless how small.

Peter had been feeling lately that perhaps he and Jenny had come to the end of their story,

Odd that your life can contain such significant trip wires to your future and, even while you wander through them, you have no idea.

It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved. Which

It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved.

…one of those terrifying rows where suddenly an end you never thought would come rears up in front of you, like a cliff edge you weren’t aware of.

Had she been too hard on her as a girl? Was that why she’d grown up so fearful, somehow, so reluctant to make her way in the world?

A bee drones by, scribbling on the air near their heads...

When she first came to New York she knew no one. She arrived in a rush, like someone who trips when they enter a room.

Mainly, she lived. She got on with the small acts of life. She continued to ensure that - in the phrase she always used inside her own head - she got away with it. No one found her out.

He’d come home a few weeks ago and opened the front door, as yet innocent of what had occurred behind it that day, as yet full of trust that his wife was still the person she’d always been.

The Irish are good in a crisis, Michael Francis thinks, as he eases back the clingfilm on a tray of sandwiches his aunt Bridie has left in the kitchen. They know what to do, what traditions must be observed; they bring food, casseroles, pies, they dole out tea. They know how to discuss bad news: in murmurs, with shakes of the head, their accents wrapping themselves around the syllables of misfortune. A