Nanny Passed Away Quotes

I never meant to bring all of it upon you. Surely you understand that. I have loved you and admired you all my life. You are the only true hero I have. I owe you everything.' Lizzie reached out and stripped leaves off a twig. 'You always wanted to do something big. Something important.' 'Is that such a terrible thing? You're the one who told me once that the world can't forgive ambition in a woman.' 'I never got to find out. My ambitions never seemed to figure into things. You were away at the university when Mother got sick, so it fell to Jessie and me. And you were already married by the time Jessie passed. Your life was set. Suddenly there was a niece to raise, and then...' Lizzie paused. ' Then you had your personality to go discover.' She tossed away a fistful of leaves. 'You had everything. You had a wonderful man who adored you, beautiful healthy children. Freedom. No money worries. A nanny and a housekeeper. You didn't have to work, and Edwin never asked a thing of you. Do you realize what you gave up for Frank Wright? The kind of life most women-- most feminists-- dream of.

You have never seen the sun set at this height. Come, look.’ The puller went to the edge and sat down, his legs hanging over the side. He saw that they hesitated. ‘Come. You can lie down and peer over the edge, if you like.’ Hillalum did not wish to seem like a fearful child, but he could not bring himself to sit at a cliff face that stretched for thousands of cubits below his feet. He lay down on his belly, with only his head at the edge. Nanni joined him. ‘When the sun is about to set, look down the side of the tower.’ Hillalum glanced downward, and then quickly looked to the horizon. ‘What is different about the way the sun sets here?’ ‘Consider, when the sun sinks behind the peaks of the mountains to the west, it grows dark down on the plain of Shinar. Yet here, we are higher than the mountaintops, so we can still see the sun. The sun must descend further for us to see night.’ Hillalum’s jaw dropped as he understood. ‘The shadows of the mountains mark the beginning of night. Night falls on the earth before it does here.’ Kudda nodded. ‘You can watch night travel up the tower, from the ground up to the sky. It moves quickly, but you should be able to see it.’ He watched the red globe of the sun for a minute, and then looked down and pointed. ‘Now!’ Hillalum and Nanni looked down. At the base of the immense pillar, tiny Babylon was in shadow. Then the darkness climbed the tower, like a canopy unfurling upward. It moved slowly enough that Hillalum felt he could count the moments passing, but then it grew faster as it approached, until it raced past them faster than he could blink, and they were in twilight. Hillalum rolled over and looked up, in time to see darkness rapidly ascend the rest of the tower. Gradually, the sky grew dimmer as the sun sank beneath the edge of the world, far away. ‘Quite a sight, is it not?’ said Kudda. Hillalum said nothing. For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.

Talk to me, Anna,” he said, wrapping his second hand around the back of hers. “You’ve become inscrutable, and I have enough sisters to know this is not a good thing.” “You would leave me no privacy.” But when the earl stretched out his legs, his thigh casually resting against hers, she did not move away. “You have more privacy than anyone else in my household,” the earl chided. “You answer only to me, have the run of the property, and have the only private sitting room on four floors besides my own. And”—he kissed her knuckles—“you are stalling.” She laid her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes, and felt him nuzzling at her temple. “Sweetheart,” he murmured, “tell me what’s troubling you. Dev says you’ve shadows in your eyes, and I have to agree.” “Him.” Anna’s head came off his shoulder. “Has he offended? Pinched Nanny Fran one too many times? Offended Cook?” “He has offended me,” Anna said on a sigh. “Or he would, if I could stay mad at him, but he’s just protective of you.” “The duke used that same excuse to nearly unravel my niece’s entire family. He was protecting me when he bribed Elise, and he was protecting someone every time he crossed the lines his duchess would not approve of.” “I pointed out the parallel to St. Just when he warned me not to trifle with you.” “And here I’ve been pleasuring myself nigh cross-eyed because you won’t trifle with me,” the earl said. Anna smiled at his rejoinder despite herself. When she glanced over, he obligingly crossed his eyes. “What else did St. Just have to say?” the earl prompted when the moment of levity had passed. “If you value me, he will, as well. I don’t know what that meant, Westhaven. He is a difficult man to read.” “He was welcoming you to the family, and all without a word to me.

Xanthi had passed through Union Station’s vast Beaux Arts atrium, the Great Hall, magnificent and scary to me as a kid...There she stood in black garments, individual, resilient. Her green eyes anomalous to the Peloponnesus, more common among mountain Greeks. She was like that one blade of grass my dad’s lawnmower couldn’t cut, no matter how many times he went over it. Almost no gray hairs glinted among her dark ones tucked back into a tiny bun. She stepped toward us, pulling out of a movie, away from the first decades of a century pockmarked by war, famine, earthquakes, and a Great Depression denting the hubris of Union Station, colossal behind her.