Mariana Monica Dickens Quotes

Nothing that ever happens in life can take away the fact that I am me. So I have to go on being me.

But Mariana was wrong. You couldn't die. You had to go on. When you were born, you were given a trust of individuality that you were bound to preserve. It was precious. The things that happened in your life, however closely connected with other people, developed and strengthened that individuality. You became a person.

However, now she was a schoolgirl no longer. She had discovered how to manage her hair, had been to one or two parties and a night club, and laid on lipstick with the idea that each layer was a layer of sophistication.

The lovely effects of champagne were quite gone and only the nasty ones were left; the taste in the mouth, the splitting ache in the brow and the impotence of not being able to clarify one's thoughts.

It was with a shock of pitying surprise that she realized, in later years, that the grown-ups had missed the paradise which the children found so easily.

What else happened?' she asked, not because she was particularly interested, but because one must talk to one's mother when she came to visit one, however tired and dispirited one felt.

Mary could be as sullen or rebellious as anyone on occasion, but she never achieved the glorious abandon with which Angela simply went her own way, uncaring.

She did not get a medal - it was not fair. 'What a swizz,' she whispered bitterly to her mother as Cicely Barnard's name was called. 'She simply doesn't know enough to be bad.

Now that it was safe to drag their relationship out into the light and examine it mercilessly it was fantastic on what a thin basis they had proposed to build their life. Apart from physical attraction, there was nothing between them but fun and parties, and that was not entirely a taste in common. Life was like a jigsaw, but if you tried to fit the pieces together yourself, you generally got them wrong.

Beyond the room, the night was lashing itself to an impotent fury of wind and rain. Mary thought how strange it was to think that only a few inches of wall separated the placid cosiness of the sitting-room from the howling, streaming darkness. Houses were very defiant things.

While they were dancing, the buoyancy that the champagne had given her left her all at once, and she slumped and felt suddenly tired and miserable about all the things that Denys should have said and done and hadn't. At the end of the dance there was one awful moment when she was bored. She didn't want to go and be kissed in the garden, she didn't want to drink any more, and Denys was in no mood for conversation; what was there to do? She was bored. It was a terrible, treacherous thought to feel like that when you were with someone you loved.

She had not told her mother about Denys, but she had a suspicion that Mrs. Shannon knew all about it nevertheless. It was unlike her not to want to satisfy her curiosity when she came upon her daughter sobbing in various parts of the house. She had asked no questions; she had simply donned the role of the heavily understanding mother, and had done a lot of shoulder-patting and given Mary an expensive evening dress from the shop. Mary had no idea how she knew, but was certain that if she had not known she would never have rested until she did.

If Paris had a feeling of its own in the air, so had England, but you only noticed it when you have been away. It was a feeling of damp, fresh security. Everything looked so right and so comfortably unexotic, like a caabage. It seemed that even the breezes blew there because they knew that England was the only possible country in which to blow. Mary had never been away for so long before, and she stepped down the gangway with the joyful feeling that she was returning to where she belonged. The train sped through the fields of Kent, and their greenness was an almost unbearable joy. How strange that in two countries that were once one, separated now by a bare twenty miles of water, the colour of the grass could be quite different. The meadows of France were grey-green, like the field uniforms of her soldiers, but here, in England, the meadows that for centuries had known only peace alone with the brightest, greenest green of early summer. Mary had never been particularly fond of Kent, but she took it to her heart now, and stared out of the window, oblivious of the carriage behind her, as once she had done in the train that took her to Charbury.

Mary thought how strange it was to think that only a few inches of wall separated the placid cosiness of the sittingroom from the howling, streaming darkness. Houses were very defiant things.

If one's mother cries, there is nothing stable left in the world.

There are moment in life when one ceases to live and merely exists, when physical misery or discomfort become so great that they exclude all other sensations. One goes on, automatically, a body without a mind, like a tadpole, with no thought of the past or hope for the future. The present is eternity and fabricated of despair.