The Light Years Quotes

“Now he must get back to Margaret. In the old days, he used to come home full of tales about deliveries, excited, even exalted by having witnessed the same old miracle. But after they lost both their sons in the war, she couldn't stand to hear about any of that and he kept it to himself. She had become a shadow, acquiescent, passive, full of humdrum little remarks about the house and the weather and how hard he was on his clothes, and then he'd bought her a puppy, and she talked endlessly about that. It had become a fat spoiled dog, and still she talked about it as though it were a puppy. It was all he could think to do for her, as his grief had never been allowed to be on par with hers. He kept that to himself as well. But when he was alone in the car like this, and with a drop of whisky inside him, he thought about Ian and Donald who were never spoken of at home, who would, he felt, be entirely forgotten except for his own memory and their names on the village monument.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Light Years

“This duel of consideration for one another that they had conducted for the last sixteen years involved shifting the truth about between them or withholding it altogether and was called good manners or affection, supposed to smooth the humdrum or prickly path of everyday married life. Its tyranny was apparent to neither.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Light Years

“it seemed to Diana that her entire life was spent in keeping up a bewildering variety of appearances and, in between them, in making do.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Light Years

“She had lovely curly hair but with bits of white in it that were worrying because Lydia wanted her never to be dead which people with white hair could easily be.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Light Years

“just where they had left it at Christmas. They collected”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Light Years

“It was funny how with grown-ups you had to say the same things again and again. Perhaps that was why babies were born with such big heads: the head stayed the same and the person got larger, but it meant that there was the same amount of room in your brain to remember things, so the longer you lived, the more you forgot.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Light Years

“once confided to him late at night after a game of billiards and rather a lot of excellent port that his wife hated it so much that she’d only let him do it when she wanted a baby. She was a damned attractive woman, too, and a wonderful wife, as Martyn had said. In other ways. They had five children, and Martyn didn’t think she was going to wear a sixth. Rotten for him. When Edward had suggested that he find consolation elsewhere, Martyn had simply gazed at him with mournful brown eyes and said, ‘But I’m in love with her, old boy, always have been. Never looked at anyone else. You know how it is.’ And Edward, who didn’t, said of course he did. That conversation had warned him off Marcia Slocombe-Jones anyhow. It didn’t matter, because although he could have gone for her there were so many other girls to go for. How lucky he was! To have come back from France not only alive, but relatively unscathed! In winter, his chest played him up a bit due to living in trenches where the gas had hung about for weeks, but otherwise . . . Since then he’d come back, gone straight into the family firm, met Villy at a party, married her as soon as her contract with the ballet company she was with expired and as soon as she’d agreed to the Old Man’s dictate that her career should stop from then on. ‘Can’t marry a gal whose head’s full of something else. If marriage isn’t the woman’s career, it won’t be a good marriage.’ His attitude was thoroughly Victorian, of course, but all the same, there was quite a lot to be said for it. Whenever Edward looked at his own mother, which he did infrequently but with great affection, he saw her as the perfect reflection of his father’s attitude: a woman who had serenely fulfilled all her family responsibilities and at the same time retained her youthful enthusiasms – for her garden that she adored and for music. At over seventy, she was quite capable of playing double concertos with professionals. Unable to discriminate between the darker, more intricate veins of temperament that distinguish one person from another, he could not really see why Villy should not be as happy and fulfilled as the Duchy. (His mother’s Victorian reputation for plain living – nothing rich in food and no frills or pretensions about her own appearance or her household’s had long ago earned her the nickname of Duchess – shortened by her own children to”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Light Years

“Seafang”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Light Years

“Mum could be a nurse,’ he said, anxious to include her (she’d been jolly decent”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Light Years

“Lovely.’ She called it a white lie to herself, and over the years it had come to have an almost cosy ring. Of course she loved him, so what else could she say? Sex was for men, after all. Women, nice women anyway, were not expected to care for it, but her own mother had intimated (the only time she had ever even remotely touched upon the subject) that it was the gravest possible mistake ever to refuse one’s husband. So she had never refused him and if, eighteen years ago, she had suffered some shock accompanied by acute pain when she discovered what actually happened, practice had dissolved these feelings into those merely of a patient distaste, and at the same time it was a way of proving her love which she felt must be right.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Light Years

“If people had to spend all of every day getting enough food to eat like animals, they wouldn’t have time to make aeroplanes or bombs.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Light Years