flowers though still dying

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

If I asked more favours of people, I would find people more kind.

Margaret Drabble

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

an incestuous friendship will outlive, as I have discovered, any passionate love.

Margaret Drabble

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

I saw that from now on I, like that woman, was going to have to ask for help, and from strangers too: I who could not even ask for love or friendship.

Margaret Drabble

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

as soon as I started to speak I realized that I had not taken it in, I had not got it into a state fit for anecdote,

Margaret Drabble

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

I let him go, without a word about any other meeting, though he was the one thing I wanted to keep: I wanted him in my bed all night, asleep on my pillow, and I might have had him, but I said nothing.

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

It was one of those nights when the air is blood-temperature and it's impossible to tell where you leave off and it begins.

Elaine Dundy

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

It was a beautiful night; warm and clear and quick. I seemed to get warmer and quicker as it went on; I seemed to be melting as I burned faster, like a candle.

Elaine Dundy

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

And I remember a little later wondering why things always turn out to be diametrically opposed to what you expect them to be. It's no good even trying to predict what this opposite will be because it always fools you and turns out to be the opposite of that, if you see what I mean. If you think this is geometrically impossible all I can say is that you don't know my life.

Elaine Dundy

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.

Robert Lowell

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

The air through which she was swiftly passing was mauve, and tense with suspended dew: her own beautiful restlessness was everywhere.

Elizabeth Bowen

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

Altogether the world was in a crying state of exasperation, but that was hardly her fault: too much had been going on for too long. Like someone bidden to enter an already overcrowded and overcharged room, she paused for as long as possible on the threshold, waiting for something to subside, for the floor to empty or the air to clear.

Elizabeth Bowen

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

Impossible is it for persons to be changed when the days they have still to live stay so much the same.

Elizabeth Bowen

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

Perhaps I missed many golden opportunities—but to do, to be what? Nothing I wanted.

Penelope Mortimer

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

Slowly, little by little, almost imperceptibly, I let them drift until only our fingertips were touching, then reaching, then finding nothing. Our hands dropped and we turned away.

Penelope Mortimer

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

Now it's up to you to do the forgiving and forgetting. Now it's your turn to refuse freedom or give it out inch by inch.

Penelope Mortimer

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

Jake was mobile at parties, relentlessly leaving people in the middle of a sentence, always planning his next move. I seemed to go from trap to trap.

Penelope Mortimer

[alibis-not-needed-anymore]

He looked at me, momentarily sharp, as a man looks at a safe he means to burgle later.

Penelope Mortimer