“Yes, life has to go on, and I suppose a cup of tea does make it seem to be doing that more than anything.” -Barbara Pym #barbarapym #booksky

“Sometimes as she walked about, she saw something that made her laugh out loud in the street. Sometimes she felt menaced by the people and the buildings, and she had to reason with herself not to run. She was happy without knowing it—anything made her laugh just as anything made her cry.

“The sky, as they talked and waited, was turning from night to day. The earth still slept, but it was visible in a strange light of no colour. To the east the grey husk of sky split apart and showed a naked whiteness. Seen in that way, the whiteness was startling.

"To find joy in the bread - that is the best gratitude! Gratitude that ends when the last bite has been swallowed." -On Gratitude-From a Diary, 1919 Earthly Signs - Moscow Diaries (1917-1922) Marina Tsvetaeva #MarinaTsvetaeva #diaries #russianliterature #booksky

"The War was the natural result of this insensitiveness. What else could you expect from a society which can think of nothing to do with its surplus grain but to let it rot? It is like a motor-car which has reached the point where it no longer pays to repair it. ...Order is unnatural.

Note: Self-knowledge possibly beneficial, but almost always unpleasant to a degree. -The Diary of a Provincial Lady, E.M. Delafield 📸Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy #emdelafield #autobiographical #classicliterature #booksky

"It is impossible to keep up an illusion of intellectual freedom when all you long for in the world is a cup of tea." -Women Against Men (The Single Heart), Storm Jameson 📸Photo by Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash #StormJameson #literaryfiction #classicliterature #cupoftea #booksky

"Yulia Sergeevna left, and a little later, Laptev took his leave of the doctor and went home. When a man is dissatisfied and feels unhappy, how banal seem to him all these lindens, shadows, clouds, all these self-satisfied and indifferent beauties of nature!

'...Gifts, sad and defining, books read, ideas stored-all intact and battered by an inconstant will.' -Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth Hardwick 📸Photo by Rachel Claire #elizabethhardwick

Discarded clothes from UK brands dumped in protected Ghana wetlands

“ Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all its sons away, and its daughters, too, and the tastes and ideas of each generation, together with its ideals and conventions, go rolling downstream with it like so much debris.” - Candleford Green, Flora Thompson #booksky

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.” -The Color Purple, Alice Walker #booksky

“On 10 June 1940, the Italian dictator Mussolini declared war against the- Allies. Four days later, the German army entered Paris. The French government was about to surrender.” - Nella Last’s War, The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 49

“We all leave one another. We die, we change—it’s mostly change—we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it’s inescapable …” -Edna O'Brien, The Country Girls #booksky

“Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.” -Excellent Women, Barbara Pym #booksky

Israel-Gaza war live: Doctors Without Borders condemns ‘ridiculously inadequate’ aid as 45 more people killed in strikes www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...

“The tender green of last Sunday has deepened and the white blossom faded. But a riot of pink and white apple blossom, soft misty fields, woods of hyacinth blue and, on gardens and parks, the clear hard pink of Japanese cherry and the many shades of lilac, with the sun over-all made a smiling land.”

All this cruelty is having a terrible impact on people in Gaza I have two wishes, the first that Anthony Albanese is forced to admit he failed, because he has Second - Israel is destroyed Anyone pretending that Israel can be allowed to continue is living in a fantasy world read

“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.” -Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop #booksky

The Nakba never ended. 77 years on, and somehow, Palestinians are still being slaughtered by Israel in full view of the world, with shameless impunity. The West either looks away - or pays for the bombs. I will never reconcile how such ruthless evil can continue. Free Palestine 🇵🇸💔

May Christina Rossetti . It passed away with sunny May, With all sweet things it passed away, And left me old, and cold, and grey. #booksky

Are we heading for another world war – or has it already started? www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

“We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever-the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.” #booksky

‘Stealing joy’: the sadness and symbolism of the crime at Sycamore Gap www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

“Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent." -Virginia Woolf

About 290,000 children are ‘on the brink of death’ due to Israeli blockade on Gaza that started on March 2. aje.io/p407e2

Freedom by Mary Webb . . . Let us away, out of the murky day Of sullen towns, into the silver noise Of woods where every bud has found her way Sunward, and every leaf has found a voice.

There is a war on journalists raging around the world: let their voices be heard. www.theguardian.com/media/2025/m... “Where once a blue press vest offered some guarantee of protection, now many journalists in war zones say it feels like it puts a target on their backs.”

“There was so much time that marvelous summer. Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage-magic” -J L Carr, A Month in the Country #Booksky

“I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily and for a minute I did not know why my heart was beating faster than usual. Then I remembered. The old reason. He had not come home.” -The Country Girls, Edna O’Brien #booksky

“The leaves and the trees were bathed in the mist, and the trees looked un-real, like trees in a dream. Around the forget-me-nots that sprouted out of the side of the hedge were haloes of water. Water that glistened like silver ..

“By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that might be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.” -J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

“Books are the immortality of the race, the father and mother of most that is worthwhile cherishing in our hearts. To spread good books about, to sow them on fertile minds, to propagate understanding and a carefulness of life and beauty, isn't that high enough mission for a man?”

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot - Interrupted Reading - 1922.410 - Art Institute of Chicago.jpg Today is World Book Day

Revealed: Big tech’s new datacentres will take water from the world’s driest areas www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Castoffs to catwalk: fashion show shines light on vast Chile clothes dump visible from space www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

“Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.” -The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot

“Who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm? - the unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.” -The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot

Glacier meltdown risks food and water supply of 2bn people, says UN

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it — if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass - the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows..

“When I think of being a child, I think of being myself in that shop that late afternoon, with dusk coming on fast and a jet of gas like a fish's tail, or a flower - an iris - flickering, warbling overhead. It has lasted a lifetime, but that is as long as it can last ..

“She relished his great sea-faring lies: how, in the moonlight, he had mistaken sea cows for mermaids; how he and many of his crew had watched the sunset over the Pacific form into a vast crucifixion scene, the oddly contorted violet clouds against the blood-red, ..

“The leaves hung asleep upon the trees dreaming themselves through death; the clouds lay low on the hill-tops, even on the roof-tops; color had fled beyond the sky forever with the smoke of the leaves' scarlet burning. All the world said softly yet without speech, ..

“Solitude would be no solitude-rest no rest— while the vulture, hunger, thus sank beak and talons in my side.” -Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

“True, generous feeling is made small account of by some: - but here were two natures rendered, the one intolerably acrid, the other despicably savourless for the want of it. Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; ..

“Finish the bulbs and put them in the cellar. Feel that after all cellar is probably draughty, change my mind, and take all up to the attic. Cook says something is wrong with the range.” -The Diary of a Provincial Lady, E.M. Delafield.