next door Quotes

Funny, tough-minded and tender, this is the story of Matilda and her two sisters growing up in Sydney, Australia, in the early 1950s. Their father is mentally unstable and largely absent, their mother is possibly in the thrall of his brother, and a headline-making Russian spy defection is taking place next door.

“His house was next door to an old people’s home and he knew all the people who lived there.”

Foreign Lands Up into the cherry tree Who should climb but little me? I held the trunk with both my hands And looked abroad on foreign lands. I saw the next-door garden lie, Adorned with flowers, before my eye, And many pleasant places more That I had never seen before.

“As he slowed down, panting because of the 9500-foot altitude, he reflected that this capital city of Ecuador was certainly next door to heaven. It was one of the highest capital cities in the world.”