Book: Time Will Darken It
Quotes of Book: Time Will Darken It
The world {including Drapervilleh is not a nice place, and the innocent and the young have to take their chances. They cannot be watched over, twenty-four hours of the day. At what moment, from what hiding-place, the idea of evil will strike, there is no telling. And when it does, the result is not always disastrous. Children have their own incalculable strength and weakness, and this, for all their seeming helplessness, will determine the pattern of their lives. Even when you suspect why they fall downstairs, you cannot be sure. You have no way of knowing whether their fright is permanent or can be healed by putting butter on the large lump that comes out on their foreheads after a fall. book-quoteevildangerparentingMother, listen to me. Now's your chance, do you hear? I know that when I start to talk about what I really think and want and believe, something comes over you, some terrible fit of impatience, so that your knees twitch and you can't even sit still long enough to hear what I have to say. You listen to other people. Anybody but your own daughter you have all the patience in the world with. I've watched you. You know just what to say and what not to say. With everybody but me you're wonderful. I wish I had a mirror. I wish I could show you what you look like right now, your face flushed and set, and that expression of grim endurance. Why do you have to endure your own daughter? I get furious at you but I don't endure you. What is it you want me to be? Do you want me to be domestic, like Cousin Martha, and worry about meals and whether the cook is in a bad temper and whether my husband is looking at some other woman? I haven't any husband to be jealous of, and I haven't any house, either. So I can't very well be domestic, can I? Or worry about the temper of the cook who doesn't exist? Do you want me to be afraid of you the way the Beach girls are afraid of their mother, so that when you're around all the life and hope goes out of me, and everybody thinks what a pity it is that such a charming delightful woman should have a dull daughter? Well I won't be dull for anybody, not even you. I'm not dull so why should I pretend to be? Or easy going, or self-controlled or anything else...What you are thinking now I know. I can read it in your face. We've been over this a thousand times, you're saying, so why do we have to go over it again? But we haven't been over it a thousand times. I've never really talked to you the way I'm talking now, never in my whole life. Always before I've spared you, spared your feelings, and this time I'm not going to. I don't see any reason to spare your feelings. You're a grown woman and you had enough courage to leave my father and to come back to him, which I wouldn't have been able to do. I'd have died first. book-quoteFor most people, having company for more than three of four days is a serious mistake, the equivalent to sawing a large hole in the roof and leaving all the doors and windows open in the middle of winter. Out of a desire to be helpful or the need to be kind, they let themselves in for prolonged spells of entertaining, forfeit their privacy and their easy understanding, knowing that the result will be an estrangement―however temporary―between husband and wife, and that nothing proportionate to this is to be gained by the giving up of beds, the endless succession of heavy meals, the afternoon drives. Either the human race is incurably hospitable or else people forget from one time to the next, as women forget the pains of labor, how weeks and months are lost that can never be recovered.
The guest also loses―even the so-called easy guest who makes her own bed, helps with the dishes and doesn't require entertaining. She sees things no outsider should see, overhears whispered conversations about herself from two rooms away, finds old letters in books, and is sooner or later the cause of and witness to scenes that because of her presence do not clear the air. When she has left, she expects to go on being a part of the family she has stayed with so happily and for so long; she expects to be remembered; instead of which, her letters, full of intimate references and family jokes, go unanswered. She sends beautiful presents to the children at a time when she really cannot afford any extravagance and the presents also go unacknowledged. In the end her feelings are hurt, and she begins to doubt―quite unjustly―the genuineness of the family's attachment to her. book-quote
