"We were sitting on the veranda. Oh, everything was there - the wicker chairs, the table with the tea tray on it, the scent of the flowers, the scent of India, the air of certainty, of perpetuity; but, as well, the odd sense of none of it happening at all because it had begun wrong and continued wrong, and so was already ended, and was wrong even in its ending, because its ending, for me, was unreal and remote, and yet total in its envelopment, as if it had already turned itself into a beginning. Such constant hope we suffer from!"

- Ms. Daphne Manners, from The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott

The simplificaton of anything is always sensational.

-G.K. Chesterson

I don't know where it all begins.  And I don't know where it all will end.

But we're better off for all that we let in.

~ Indigo Girls

Things aren't always as scary as they seem.

It's okay if you get hurt. You were designed to heal.
 
...I have heard your prayer and seen your tears; I will heal you... 2 Kings 20:5

It's as if she said to herself:


      Well, life is not just a business of standing on dry land
      and occasionally getting your feet wet.


           It is merely an illusion that some of us stand on one
           bank and some on the opposite.


               So long as we stand like that we are not living at
               all, but dreaming.


                  So jump, jump in, and let the shock wake us up.


                      Even if we drown, at least for a moment or two
                      before we die we shall be awake and alive.

from The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott

To get from one place to the other you could not cross by a bridge, but had to take your courage in your hands and enter the flood and let yourself be taken with it, lead where it may. 

from The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott