Charlotte Makepeace Quotes

“She was used to seeing the wounded men from the hospital with their bright blue uniforms and bright red ties, the colours, she thought, if not the clothes of Arthur’s soldiers. Such things did not disturb her, and the war seemed quite remote.”

“And, she thought uncomfortably, what would happen if people did not recognize you? Would you know who you were yourself? If tomorrow they started to call her Vanessa or Janet or Elizabeth, would she know how to be, how to feel like, Charlotte? Were you some particular person only because people recognized you as that?”

“Charlotte was used to all the marks of war: the shabbiness of things, bad food, shop queues, posters about the war effort, people with worried faces, people dressed in black.”

“Charlotte looked up doubtfully, wondering why, as she got older, she seemed to be more afraid of things, not less.”

“Charlotte believed in ghosts, for after all, she had been a kind of ghost herself.”

“After a while she began to think it might be a relief if she could cry as Susannah was doing and perhaps cry herself to sleep. But she could not cry- her eyes felt quite dried up.”

“Besides the satisfaction of writing her name so carefully, it seemed also curiously comforting to prove emphatically over and over again that she was still Charlotte Makepeace just as she had been yesterday at home. For since this morning she had felt herself to be so many different people, and half of them she did not recognize.”

“Charlotte and Emily wore gloves and carried prayerbooks, as did everyone. They were meant to keep silence on their way. ‘It’s so that we can think holy thoughts for church, you see,’ Bunty explained. ‘Not that I ever seem to have any.‘”

“There was something disconcerting about a book that had her own name on it, that no one ought to have written except herself, and yet that she had not written. Nor was her name now her property alone.”

“Charlotte did not like being called standoffish much. But it was so difficult when she was only here every other day. Often she did not know what had happened, what was going on, and she was afraid of showing it, of saying things that might make everyone suspicious.”