Magda Szabò

Abigail

Marion 

Much later, when there were no more secrets to distract her, and her eyes were no longer blinded by misery to such important new experiences, she would look back and remember her first encounter with the Great Plain, in the bleak light of autumn, so different from the deep luxuriant glow of summer.

Sometimes a nightmare can be so cruel, so murderous, so horrifying and hope-destroying that it leaves you whimpering and moaning for someone to come and wake you.

She was among sisters, nineteen of them. After that stormy start to the year, and those painful early confrontations, she now lived among them in an intimacy and harmony such as she had never known before.

Like hungry little foxes, they were always on the qui vive, looking to squeeze out every bit of fun they could in the thicket of rules and regulations and constant supervision. It was a never-ending quest, in which twenty pairs of shoulders and twenty young minds forever looking for love and laughter supported and sustained one another.

She was oppressed by a consciousness of living in a world of strangers, subject to rules that constantly disrupted the rhythm of her life, and where everything that belonged to her, everything that was part of her, seemed far away.

It’s not a tragedy and it wasn’t one yesterday.

life, for all its horrors, was wonderful, and of all those wonders the most precious was youth. 

Abigail quotes

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