10 Quotes by Harriet Lane

I once heard someone on the radio saying that a bee is never more than forty minutes away from starving to death, and this fact has stayed with me because it seems to have a certain personal resonance. My children are in a perpetual proximity to catastrophe: concussion, dehydration, drowning or sunstroke. Keeping them safe requires constant vigilance.I've turned into one of those mothers, full of terror.

The house fills with the particular atmosphere that accompanies peacefully sleeping children: a rich narcotic silence that creeps down the stairs and twines itself around the table legs.

The moment just before I go to sleep is often the highlight of my day: the letting go, the sense of becoming unreachable.

After a while, the rhythm of his breath slackens and deepens, and he rolls away, towards the ghostly hands of his alarm clock.

I found the final plot twist unsatisfying, as plot twists often are: nothing like life, which – it seems to me – turns less on shocks or theatrics than on the small quiet moments, misunderstandings, or disappointments, the things that it’s easy to overlook.

Over time, I’ve come to see that so much of a personality boils down to confidence: whether you have it, or not.

I’ve thought about the pictures often; what they show or, more accurately, don’t show. Remembering what was happening elsewhere: in the distance, or behind the camera, off to one side.

I know the names of the books – their old covers bleached to palest greens or pinks by the endless cycle of summers – lined up on the shelf.

I turn my back and look out to sea, the sun so low and molten that my eyes fill with tears, and yet I can feel it: a cooler wind is coming in, the edge of evening approaching. Dusk is gathering along the coast, in the coves and quaysides and marinas, where in an hour or so the long strings of coloured bulbs will twinkle and sway; and then it will pass over us-like a visitation: a plague or a blessing...