hexafu

the shaping of a writer

Daphne Du Maurier

all autobiography is self indulgent

don’t care was made to care

g was half round like a c but had a little seat

hold their manhood cheap

SLOUGH OF DESPOND

if something was not true, why make it up in the first place?

no Father Christmas must mean no God

the ritual of Grace: Get it over. The Lord wasn’t listening

we children lived in a cottage at the end of the garden

“I like the Germans.. I would like to have German to tea with me here today’

the soldier’s hat was superb

Who were you with last night
Out in the pale moonlight

“bring out your dead.. bring out your dead..” Jeanne, from the bedroom window threw all the teddy bears down.. the wheelbarrow was a convenient death cart

how nobly she walks to her death

I would writhe, attacked by rodents, in the notorious Rat Pit

the dead relations in their grave who never meant very much to me gradually became real and all of them young

the coward, I thought, the coward..

snap or beggar my neighbour

Pas devant la enfants

Not in front of the children

on Sundays she and Granny would take me to church at St Jude’s, which was almost as good as going to a matinee

Grandpa, who carved with great solemnity

she would talk to her Pekinese dog which she adored and which tried to bite her every time she groomed him

“If you don’t drink it Merry will”

so time did not exist, for the aged

the first cry at birth to the sinking pulse at the end.. whom have we left behind us on the way, what ghosts, what crouching figures by what window?

we are all ghosts of yesterday

old fashioned reticence was wrong, suggesting shame, even disgust at what comes naturally

to bleed, all my life, until I was old? Was it the same as the illness the poor little Tsarevitch Alexis had beore he was murdered in a cellar with his parents and sister?

perhaps it takes a while to appreciate Gerge Eliot

if I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England

possibly, like many a work of genius, it never got beyond the first page!

dear as remembered kisses after death

he desended to the lower garden.. said goodbye to the many friends who had gathered there. Nobody, of course

the only timid one of the trio was the nameless heroine in Rebecca.. she found strength and purpose when she dosicovered that her husband Maxim truly loved her, and had never cared for his first wife Rebecca

blotting paper

Fire that heats and does not burn
And wind that blows the heart of flame

the need of a world of men for me

the fruit that Eve ate was really an orange, and Man has been slipping on the peel ever since

no whispers, no kisses. No fumbling in the dark