21 Quotes by Tessa Hadley

Andy was receptive, like a deep vessel into which life was poured. If this terrible particular thing hadn't been poured into her, she would have been happier--it goes without saying--but less of a person. She was filled out by her fate. I actually think that this is quite rare, the capacity to become the whole shape of the accidents that happen to you.

Part of the oddity of marriage, she thought, was in how unwise it was to attend too intently to the other person. In order for love to survive, you had to close yourself off to a certain extent.

You just say the opposite to what everyone else thinks. Is that why people think you’re so clever?

This is what had always happened to women when they had too much time to think: they made themselves conduits to all the passions in the universe, they dreamed open all the possibilities that sane hard-working people kept shut away.

Goodness knows what hallucinations of danger and siege people are subject to, if they live anywhere too beautiful and too sequestered.

Once they had been equal in their separate freedoms. They had set out to have children as lightly as if they were playing house, and now her necessarily domestic life bored him, and she was bound to it in her body and imagination. This imbalance was fated, built into their biology.

I'm really all right, she would think, carefully, lightly, as she pulled the key from the ignition, trying not to examine the sensation too closely or lose it with any sudden movement, as if it were a thin-filmed shiny bubble poised in her chest.

And that was true too, that was what the Culverts were like: crucified by their shyness and at the same time contemptuous of the world of ordinary people they couldn't talk to.

Perhaps these earthbound types were more susceptible to the freaks and fumes of delusion, having no resistance when once they stumbled in.