Casting Off by Elizabeth Jane Howard (Vol. 4 of Cazalet Chronicles)

 

Beginning Volume 5 today with great trepidation about it being over. I don't think I've ever read another novel (for I consider it one novel] as long as THE CAZALET CHRONICLES that maintained such steady, intense, interesting focus and detail on such a number of characters for so long a period (ten years, 1937-1947 so far).

p. 95 -  [Stella about her Uncle Louis after Auschwitz] "The point is that when... anyone becomes more than a certain amount unhappy they get cut off. They don't feel any comfort or concern or affection that comes from other people - all of that simply disappears inside some bottomless pit and when people realize that, they stop trying to be affectionate of comforting."

p. 343 - ... how the Duchy had once said to him that part of bearing the responsibility for one's actions entailed not unburdening them to other people and making them unhappy also. 

p. 369 - ... about whether anything they ever did would in the least change the worl and its dreary, warlike, power-mongering ways, about whether the arts were a politically civilizing influence, about whether people had always been the same and the only changes were technological.

p. 503 - "Stop being so sorry for yourself, making everyone else pay for your mistakes, expecting everyone to make allowances for you without even doing them the honour of telling them why. You've got to stop wallowing."

p. 591 - [what Father Lancing had said that a monk had told him] "You can put yourself in the centre of the universe, or you can put God. You cannot put another person there."