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161 " I was not transparent, that she could not see straight through me, "
― Diane Setterfield , The Thirteenth Tale
162 " flat brown bangs, my straight skirt and navy cardigan. "
163 " profusion of fat purple and red cushions. "
164 " We turned into the rose garden where the pruned bushes appeared as piles of dead twigs, but the elaborate borders of box that surrounded them in sinuous Elizabethan patterns twisted in and out of the moonlight, showing here silver, there black. A dozen times I would have lingered—a single ivy leaf turned at an angle to catch the moonlight perfectly; a sudden view of the great oak tree, etched with inhuman clarity against the pale sky—but I could not stop. "
165 " could just see the movements of Miss Winter’s lashes. They crouched and quivered around the eye, like the long legs of a spider around its body. "
166 " I’m a storyteller.” “I am a biographer. "
167 " Don’t you think one can tell the truth much better with a story? "
168 " do you believe in ghosts? "
169 " I have written a number of short biographical studies of insignificant personages from literary history. My interest has always been in writing biographies of the also-rans: people who lived in the shadow of fame in their own lifetime and who, since their death, have sunk into profound obscurity. "
170 " copper curls turned. I was stunned. The glasses were gone. Green eyes, bright as glass and as real, "
171 " she could not be less than seventy-three or -four, and to judge by her appearance, altered though it was by illness and makeup, she could be no more than eighty. "
172 " When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. And during this time, these days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a counterpane strewn with books, when my sleep was black and dreamless and passed in a flash and I woke to read again—the lost joys of reading returned to me. Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me. From "
173 " I felt a strange sensation inside. Like the past coming to life. The watery stirring of a previous life turning in my belly, creating a tide that rose in my veins and sent cool wavelets to lap at my temples. The ghastly excitement of it. "
174 " The almanac cut her and her babies adrift; she and they fell into the vast ocean of ordinary people, whose births and deaths and marriages are, like their loves and fears and breakfast preferences, too insignificant to be worth recording for posterity. Charlie, though, was a male. The almanac could stretch itself—just—to include him, though the dimness of insignificance was already casting its shadow. Information was scant. His name was Charles Angelfield. He had been born. He lived at Angelfield. He was not married. He was not dead. As far as the almanac was concerned, this information was sufficient. "
175 " as though if I looked hard enough, there would be revealed in the grain or the watermark of the paper itself the elucidation of the mystery. "
176 " stood with my hand on the handle of the third door. The rule of three, Miss Winter had said. But I wasn’t in the mood for her story anymore. Her dangerous house with its indoor rain and trick mirror had lost its interest for me. "
177 " Just what kind of a person are you, Miss Lea?” I fixed my mask in place before replying "
178 " What are your favorite books? What do you dream about? Whom do you love? "
179 " That name was Adeline March. "
180 " We were both lone twins. "