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kyr_6592 's review for:
The Paying Guests
by Sarah Waters
“The gloss would fade in about five minutes as the surface dried; but everything faded. The vital thing was to make the most of the moments of brightness.”
“She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery, to become charged. Yes, that was it, she thought, as she turned a corner: it wasn’t a liquid creeping, it was a tingle, something electric, something produced as if by the friction of her shoes against the streets. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments—these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous.”
“It was like a cure, being with Lilian. It made one feel like a piece of wax being cradled in a soft, warm palm.”
“Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response.”
“It was disconcerting, Frances found, to see Lilian so at home among so many strangers, to think of her as having this world, this life, quite separate from her daily life in the house on Champion Hill. She thought, These people all have their claim on her. What’s mine, exactly?”
“For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?”
“For she knew that her calm came partly from courage, but more from a devastating indifference to what might happen to her now; that she had withstood so many horrors since the night of Leonard’s death that she had become stripped and smooth and colourless, like a tree in a hurricane, like a stone in a pounding sea.”
“She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery, to become charged. Yes, that was it, she thought, as she turned a corner: it wasn’t a liquid creeping, it was a tingle, something electric, something produced as if by the friction of her shoes against the streets. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments—these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous.”
“It was like a cure, being with Lilian. It made one feel like a piece of wax being cradled in a soft, warm palm.”
“Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response.”
“It was disconcerting, Frances found, to see Lilian so at home among so many strangers, to think of her as having this world, this life, quite separate from her daily life in the house on Champion Hill. She thought, These people all have their claim on her. What’s mine, exactly?”
“For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?”
“For she knew that her calm came partly from courage, but more from a devastating indifference to what might happen to her now; that she had withstood so many horrors since the night of Leonard’s death that she had become stripped and smooth and colourless, like a tree in a hurricane, like a stone in a pounding sea.”