The Shock Of The Fall Quotes
"I should say that I am not a nice person. Sometimes I try to be, but often I’m not."
"You don’t always remember the details like that, do you? You don’t remember if you were beside the recycling bins, or further up the path near to the shower blocks, and whether actually the water tap is up there?"
"I can’t now hear the manic cry of seagulls, or taste the salt in the air."
"I forgot to say, but the doll wore a coat. It was bright yellow, with a black plastic buckle at the front."
"When you’re a nine-year-old boy, it’s no easy thing to comfort a girl."
"I still don’t know what I should have said to make things better, and I’ve thought about this a lot."
"Her name was Annabelle. The girl with the red hair and a face flecked in hundreds of freckles is called Annabelle."
"Mum in particular, she holds grudges. I guess I do too."
"On a lovely day like today? Honestly, Matthew. What are we going to do with you?"
"It's like pulling off a plaster. No. It's not like that. It's a far bigger deal."
"When we decorate a room, we're wiping away its old personality and giving it a new one."
"In life there are milestones. Events that mark out certain days as being special from the other days."
"In my memory milk squirts out of Dad's nose. But probably it didn't."
"We have more in common than we care to admit."
"It's easier to sleep with problems if you know you're going to do something about them."
"You can't stop seeing them. For this perfect morning, there would have needed to be other perfect mornings."
"It's hard to know what to say sometimes, when someone does something so nice."
"The sound of faraway traffic drifted through the open window, and another sound too."
"That's the thing with Nanny, she would never force her company on someone, no matter how much she might want to."
"We shape the world around us into messages, into secret whispers spoken only for us."
"I didn’t mean to intimidate you. I didn’t mean that."
"I watched her through the peephole, waiting, hoping."
"I don’t want the world to keep turning without me on it."
"I think personalities are hidden in these details, and if you capture them properly, you capture the person."
"It’s best not to think until the injection is actually going in."
"We watched EastEnders on the big green couch."
"He was the closest I got to having a friend in that place."
"I am writing myself into my own story, and I am telling it from within."
"I am myself, the same self I have always been, the one person I can never escape."
"We don’t choose what we keep – not at that age. Not ever, really."
"This is how we piece together our past. We do it like a jigsaw puzzle, where there are missing pieces."
"The truth is, I didn’t say that much myself. I didn’t have so many memories of my own to share. Not whole memories, with beginnings, middles, and ends."
"Writing about the past is a way of reliving it, a way of seeing it unfold all over again."
"But this story has never been a keepsake – it’s finding a way to let go."
"I have nothing else to do today. It’s a beginning."