Alan Hollinghurst quote — “She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hun…”

Quote

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she’d read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art — she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle; looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene; a man in an office looking over Regent’s Park, rain in the street outside — a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years.

Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger's Child books remembering

Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse life

As she felt his fangs against her neck, she was in another world. There was screaming. A woman was somewhere in agony. Everything was black, and the tormented scream was overwhelmi…

Dawn Bonney Crimson blood book crimson excerpt horror

After a few months she left off speculating about the villagers. She admitted that there was something about them which she could not fathom, but she was content to remain outside …

Sylvia Townsend Warner Lolly Willowes