“He needed overt drama in his life. He was a person for whom the clock was always running out, the game was always tied, and the ball was always in his hands. He’d played the role for so long that he’d become the role.”
“A drama has a progressive thought, an emotional climax and a resolution, but our lives aren’t like that. All we get day after day, are a bunch of vague anxieties that are never really resolved.”
“I had a dream about you last night.
We moved into a cabin in the countryside.
I couldn’t handle the spiders.
You couldn’t handle my drama.
I moved back to the city.”
“The interior drama, therefore, is always the important one. The “story of your life” is written by you, by each reader of this book. You are the author. There is no reason, therefore, for you to view the drama and feel trapped by it. The power to change your own condition is your own. You have only to exercise it.”
Ed travels to the addresses and helps out the tangled lives of their occupants. Further playing cards appear in his life, and Ed continues to unravel their mysteries.
“Still, even now, I’m fighting my way through. Perhaps it’s a bit dramatic to say, but I’m struggling against life. Wasn’t that what I decided once? To struggle. To live. To breathe and walk. To run. To eat. To bind, musubi. To live an ordinary life so I shed tears over the sights of a perfectly ordinary town.”
“...we often mistake love for fireworks - for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm - and constant.”
“Mall and Thomas marry, but their happiness is short-lived. Finally, in October of 1666, the pestilence subsides. Mall, overwhelmed by grief and sorrow, decides to write a chronicle of all she has witnessed in Eyam, hoping that it will set her free.”
Written with remarkable, sustained intensity, this novel tells how Claudio slowly sorts though his intense feelings and comes to an uneasy peace with the fact of his friend’s death.
“Alison and Roger were playing with three flimsy cut out paper models of birds. One was on the candlestick and the other two were side by side on a chair back. The play Gwyn had brought from the loft was next to Alison’s pillow and covered with scraps of paper.”
“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Wopsle, “I am proud to see you. I hope, Mr. Pip, you will excuse my sending round. I had the happiness to know you in former times, and the Drama has ever had a claim which has ever been acknowledged, on the noble and the affluent.”