The Family Upstairs Quotes
"You don’t need eight different types of chemical to cure a headache. Your mother says she wants to stop using pills and start using my tinctures."
"We are setting ourselves free from these broken bodies, from this despicable world, from pain and disappointment."
"Just for one night, baby. I’ll be here first thing tomorrow to collect you. OK?"
"The baby has been taken into care and is said to be in good health."
"She tries to remember the last time they all washed their hair and she can’t."
"I am trying,' she says. 'Every single minute of every single day.'"
"The house is an eyesore. But such a beautiful eyesore."
"Her fingers find something solid and silky. She brings it from the box and lets it dangle from between her fingertips."
"It’s amazing,' she says. 'It’s better than it was before.'"
"Anyone who ignores the chatter of women is poorer by any measure."
"We have too much, Henry. Can you see that? Way, way too much, and when you have too much it drags you down."
"It’s all bound up in that house and if I sell it, I may never find out what really happened."
"I tried so hard to get them to let me into that house. I was virtually offering the guy at the solicitors my firstborn."
"Sometimes in life you get to a fork in the road."
"Never marry a woman. They might look good, but they destroy you."
"The only bad books are books that are so badly written that no one will publish them."
"You have to get up every morning and take them to the toilet. And you have to pick up their shit."
"All men are weak. That’s the whole bloody trouble with the world. Too weak to love properly. Too weak to be wrong."
"The weakness of men lay at the root of every bad thing that had ever happened."
"We should live up here. Bring our beds up here and live up here."
"It was going to be consensual. She was going to let him. But now she hurts and there is blood and she can smell the charred meat on his hand, see the blank fury on his face and she just wants the passports."
"I am Marie Valerie Caron. Good. Good. I am Marie Caron."
"Things are going to change around here. You mark my words."
"I didn’t touch drugs ’til I was almost eighteen! And what are you? Twelve?"
"I thought it was a mansion. Now she can see it is just a house."
"But there was a song by a band called the Original Version? It was number one for weeks the summer before we came to live in the house."
"I could tell he was simply humouring our mother by allowing her to comfort us. I could tell he did not care one iota what we thought about him and his repulsive act of penetrating and impregnating our mother."
"I was very lonely by now. I tried to rekindle my friendship (or what semblance there had ever been of a friendship) with Phin, but he was still so angry with me for betraying him the night he pushed me into the river."
"I tasted the metallic sting of blood inside my mouth, felt a numbness building up around my lips."
"I went to my parents’ bedroom the next day. I opened the cardboard boxes into which all their non-valuable possessions had been emptied when the furniture was given away."
"Our passports! This man had taken our passports! This seemed almost to surpass the sheer evil of locking us into our own home."
"He didn’t seem at all surprised to see me, as if he’d been expecting me all along, as if I was just another appointment in his busy day."
"I felt a wave of fury begin to build inside me. 'I don’t think she is healing,' I responded. 'I think she’s getting worse.'"
"We were listening for the others. We were listening to Birdie’s breathing. It had been rattly. Now it had stopped."
"He sighed and ran his hand down his beard. 'I have no clue who that guy is. But he is dodgy as fuck.'"
"Lucy used to write it all down, constantly, when she was younger. She’d buy a lined notepad and a pen and she’d sit somewhere, anywhere, and she’d write it and she’d write it and she’d write it."
"Look at you, what an absolute loser you turned out to be."
"She’s someone’s daughter! And now she’s dead!"
"I am an orphan. An orphan and an inadvertent murderer."
"I’m not completely heartless, Serenity, I promise."
"You were still that baby to me; you still had that innocence about you."
"He looks like the happiest man in the world."
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