Home > Work > Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel
1 " It was always the same: everywhere there were the hard-hearted who pretended an interest, who began a conversation and then, their cadging over, walked away. "
― William Trevor , Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel
2 " Morrissey was singularly small, a man in his mid-thirties who had once been compared to a ferret. He had a thin trap of a mouth and greased black hair that he perpetually attended, directing it back from his forehead with a clogged comb. He was dressed now, as invariably he was, in flannel trousers and the jacket of a blue striped suit over a blue pullover, and a shirt that was buttoned to the neck but did not have a tie in its collar. "
3 " I turned away from a bearded face. I put Elsie Timson's holy book down a lavatory. At St Monica's School for Girls I sat in innocence, drinking cocoa with Miss Tample until Miss Tample became a monster. My father ran away, my mother was disgraceful. God is in this kitchen,' cried Mrs Eckdorf. 'God is revealing Himself through that sleeping woman. "
4 " Always at the same time, at half past four, he visited the woman who once had been a stranger to him, a woman who in her madness confused all the facts of living, who saw things as they were not and people as they were not, who turned everything upside down and inside out. "
5 " Extraordinary things have happened to me in this city,' said Mrs Eckdorf in the bar of her hotel at half-past one on the morning of August 11th. 'You would scarce believe,' she said. "