The Guest List Quotes
"Life is messy. We all know this. Terrible things happen, I learned that while I was still a child. But no matter what happens, life is only a series of days."
"You can't control more than a single day. But you can control one of them. Twenty-four hours can be curated."
"A wedding day is a neat little parcel of time in which I can create something whole and perfect to be cherished for a lifetime, a pearl from a broken necklace."
"Every so often, they'd throw out a name, someone they'd forgotten to mention. I suppose they did check through the list at the end pretty carefully, saying they wanted to make sure we hadn’t missed anyone."
"If you and I were guests I know where I’d want to be sitting."
"I am not the sort of person who gets engaged only a few months into knowing someone ... or married only a few months after that."
"I’ve never been a worrier, the sort of person who wakes up at three in the morning, fretting. Not until recently anyway."
"It's not just about him being so beautiful – which he is, of course, objectively so. This insatiability is far deeper than that."
"I remind myself, too, that I’m far from superstitious about the groom seeing the wedding dress beforehand – I’ve never believed in that sort of thing."
"Remember how we used to smuggle beers into the school? Climb up on to the roof of the sports hall to drink them?"
"If you love someone, really, you don’t do anything to hurt them."
"I didn’t leave just because he broke up with me."
"The island looks at its most starkly beautiful this evening."
"Sometimes, when the wind is really up, it seems to carry echoes of women from centuries past."
"I miss you, but I hope you’d be proud of me."
"We could have had a bath together in the claw-footed tub."
"You should think about it, might surprise you. An older man."
"The wildness of this place gets under your skin."
"Those who have the greatest respect for the rules also take the most enjoyment in breaking them."
"Any light from the Folly makes very little impact upon it, though the kitchen is aglow – and also one of the upstairs windows, the room the soon-to-be-married couple are occupying."
"It’s the sound of someone sobbing. Man or woman, though, it’s impossible to tell."
"Our eyes are alert to any disturbance, any change in the pattern of the darkness."
"The grieving women mourning their husbands, brutally slain."
"The sensation of my skin shrinking over my bones."
"The closest thing I can find to it is my love for Alice, my sister."
"I’ll never understand how you aced those GCSEs when you did no fucking work."
"I can’t properly feel any good things any more: like the taste of food, or the sun on my face or a song I like on the radio."
"I remember how Mum seemed so different to usual, how I’d never really seen her like that before."
"It’s probably a good thing I don’t know his full name. The things I would do to him if I did."
"It feels like my whole life stopped at that point, all those years ago."
"You better not feck this up. And if you do anything to hurt my girl – well, it’s simple. I’ll come for you."
"I’ve been to so many weddings where I’ve had to force down mouthfuls of rubbery chicken breast."
"You need to get a grip of yourself. You need to shut the fuck up."
"I was a fucking idiot. I’ve always been the slow one."
"The water killed him. The game killed him, maybe. But not us."
"He wouldn’t ever have survived in the real world. He was a runt."
"You’ve got some regrets about the past, because your life is a mess."
"It’s been destroying me ever since that morning."
"I’d only be doing what we should have done years ago."