Little, Big

Sophie could see day go from her hands; they became indistinct by degrees, and life then light went from the bunch of flowers she still for some reason carried. But she felt her head to be still above the rising dark, until the path before her grew obscure and she breathed an evening coolness, and was submerged.

This way Violet had of seizing first not the most obvious sense of what people said to her but some other, interior echo or reverse side of it was a thing that baffled and frustrated her husband, who sought in her sybilline responses to ordinary questions some truth he was sure Violet knew but couldn’t quite enunciate.

Mother was powdered to the elbows in the process of pie-making, not a mindless task though she liked to call it that, in fact she found that at it her thoughts were often clearest, notions sharpest; she could do things when her body was busy that she could at no other time, things like assemble her worries into ranks, each rank commanded by a hope.

there were marginal glosses every page or so, and epigraphs, chapter headings, and all paraphernalia that makes a text into an object, logical, articulated, unreadable.

If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you’ll read. If you don’t, you’ll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway.

Men are men, but Man is a woman.
—Chesterton