A god in ruins Quotes

“A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.”

“And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!”

“The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree......The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. ('Lovely word,' Bertie said.) He liked to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread.”

“All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.And this one is Teddy's.”

“Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him.”

“was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets?”

“Secrets had the power to kill a marriage,she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said,it was secrets that could save a marriage.”

“Oh, man, ‘the nursery,’ ” Dominic said, “what a hell-hole. If I had kids I’d give them the nicest room in the house.”“You do have kids,” his kid said.“Oh, yeah, well, right, you know what I mean.”

“Popular versus literary—a false divide?”