Then She Was Gone Quotes
"When you are the parent of child who walked out of the house one morning with a rucksack full of books to study at a library a fifteen-minute walk away and then never came home again then there is no such thing as overreacting."
"Hanna always came home. Hanna had nowhere else to go."
"The people who had once shared her DNA were now strangers who occasionally sent text messages."
"There were no connections anywhere. Just little islands of life dotted here and there."
"That was how she’d once viewed her perfect life: as a series of bad smells and unfulfilled duties, petty worries and late bills."
"The disappointment she felt in him was such a tiny part of everything else she’d been feeling that she barely registered it."
"The children meanwhile were shuffling along, like trains on a track, keeping to schedule."
"Laurel filled three days a week with a job... The rest of the time she did things that she pretended were important to her."
"Her heart beat hard and heavy beneath her ribs as she drove towards Finsbury Park."
"It was possible she might have taken underwear but there was no way for Laurel to know if there was anything missing from her drawers."
"Cooking doesn’t just nurture the recipient, it nurtures the chef."
"When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it’s like I go back into the dream."
"You know, how you get to forty and you suddenly stop giving a shit about all the stupid things you worried about your whole life. Well, Poppy’s already there."
"I will never guilt-trip my children when they are adults."
"Stories are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream."
"You’re the mother of the man I love and I want you to be safe."
"I’m amazed by myself, I really am. I was so young and so appallingly unsophisticated, yet there I was in the seething belly of the metropolis."
"I qualified but I never did teach my own class. I lost my nerve. It made me feel sick to my stomach just thinking about it."
"I’d been expecting such humour in a book about maths. But there it was. Humour. Bags of it."
"I’ve never been a fan of anything much before I read your book. You were different."
"No, seriously, I was still a virgin at this point."
"I can’t remember the name of the book now. It might even have been called Bad at Maths."
"I wasn’t one for reading books, generally, and I only read this because it was in the TES."
"I’ve become quite friendly with Noelle’s daughter. And Noelle’s ex. And there’s things I’m not sure about."
"Ellie wants a tutor. You had a good one, didn’t you? Have you got her number?"
"I’ll be living on water and air by the time I’m fifty at this rate."
"She smiled and there were the tiny teeth that chilled Ellie’s soul."
"The edges of Noelle Donnelly began to blur and shiver, the walls of the room turned black and bled into everything."
"Ellie had suspected she was not fat but pregnant a few weeks after she’d first felt the baby moving."
"‘Something’s moving inside my stomach. I’m scared,’ Ellie said."
"‘You have nothing to be scared of, sweet thing. You just have a little baby in there, that is all,’ Noelle reassured."
"Ellie knew it wasn’t normal, that something had happened."
"‘I’m wondering, Ellie, what the heck this is all about. Aren’t you?’ Noelle mused aloud."
"‘My mini-me.’ That’s what you used to call her."
"‘My mother was expecting us on the 9 a.m. ferry the following day,’ Floyd recalled."
"Something warm and delicate inside her chest opens up like an unfurling flower."
"Your mother was called Ellie. She was my daughter. And she was the most wonderful, golden, perfect girl in the world."
"I don’t know if your real dad is dead, Poppy. It’s possible we’ll never know."
"Do I look like her? Yes. You look just like her."
"I think of how she will learn to live without me and I know that she will."
"The house was empty when he bought it and he spent years and thousands filling it with what he used to call objets."
"She wasn’t really a socialite. She went to glamorous parties and wore beautiful clothes but when she was at home she was just our mum."
"It all happened so slowly, yet so extraordinarily quickly, the change to our parents, to our home, to our lives after they arrived."