Anybody Out There? Quotes
"Mum flung open the sitting-room door and announced, 'Morning, Anna, time for your tablets.'"
"But when my bed was installed in the GFR there was nowhere for the other fixtures—tasseled couches, tasseled armchairs—to go."
"In Dublin suburbia brazenly lifting your nets to have a good look at 'passing life' is a social gaffe akin to painting the front of your house Schiaparelli pink."
"All the different packets and jars stood on a small, elaborately carved table—several china dogs of unparalleled hideousness had been shifted to make way for them."
"Mum loves Helen’s job, nearly more than she loves mine, and that’s saying a lot."
"The sky was blue, the day was quite warm, and all was pleasant."
"They might even have started with the well-meaning platitudes—that I was young, that I would eventually have a child of my own, etc., etc., and I was pretty sure I wasn’t ready to hear them."
"They’re such drama queens they actually thought this was exciting."
"The check was intercepted before it went out in the post with my accompanying note: Dear Mr. Prescott, although I have never met you, I believe you are a very nice man."
"It’s only this one, really," she said, gently stroking antiseptic gel onto the deep, puckered gash that ran the length of my right cheek.
"No one to blame but me. I wanted to flagellate myself with shame. That old Catholic guilt, it gets you every time."
"I don’t want to scare you, Anna, but I’ve never felt this way about anyone else, ever."
"You know, I nearly didn’t go to that party that night, and when I saw you there, talking to that meathead, that made me believe in God."
"What if I was only messing him around? Or what if he changed his mind and got back with Janie? That terrified me; I really liked him. Really, really liked him."
"You could have the best-looking man in the world but if he won’t eat the bar nuts because he’s got a Feathery Stroker fear of germs, it’s curtains."
"We never strayed into serious territory. I had questions—but I didn’t ask them because I didn’t want to know."
"She took it pretty good. She kind of hinted that maybe she might have met someone else, too."
"At the park, I saw Greg waiting with a rug over one arm, a wicker picnic basket on the other, and—with a thrill of horror—some sort of fool panama hat on his head."
"What about your gammy knee? How can you go to New York if you can’t climb a step?"
"I’m not dressing for men, I’m dressing for me."
"It’s nothing to do with Anna! It’s because I want to be a superhero, Charlie’s Angel, Lara Croft self-defense woman."
"I’d never seen a Feathery Stroker being decategorized: once a Feathery Stroker, always a Feathery Stroker."
"She’s talking about going back to New York. Tell her she’s not well enough to travel."
"In my day there was nothing at all wrong with unfinished business. You just left a place and never went back and no one thought there was anything wrong with that."
"I hadn’t a clue what she looked like. He’d been with her for so long that he didn’t look at her properly anymore."
"I’ll see what I can do. And you let me know, Anna, if you can’t cope."
"I wasn’t used to going to work on my own; we always got the subway together."
"I’d had it with New York men. They’re fucking lunatics! No wonder they have to go to speed dating."
"But showing self-restraint is the only way forward if you want a happy ending."
"It’s hard for you to rein in your natural urge to leap before you look—in affairs of the heart especially."
"Keeping a firm grip on reality is vital for you over the next seven days."
"It works if you work it, so work it, you’re worth it."
"We hadn’t much going for them but they didn’t pretend to be anything other than who they were."
"I’d rather go back to the cabana and have sex with you. We haven’t done it in over an hour."
"If I didn’t get what I wanted—a job, a bus, a pair of jeans in the right size—I used to say that 'it wasn’t meant to be,' as if there was a God."
"I feel like I’m in a dream, trying to run, with legs of lead."
"In blissful ignorance, I was saying 'We could try painting the—' when we passed into another dimension."
"I didn’t believe Aidan was in heaven. I didn’t believe in heaven at all. I didn’t even believe in God."
"Having said that, it wasn’t all fun and games: there were The Lunches."
"Staying busy, working hard, trying to stack up the days, that was the key."
"Occasionally I could even lose myself in work, I could go into another place where imagination took over and I stopped being me."
"With the exception of the rent on the apartment, I hadn’t paid any bills."
"The urge to talk to him was suddenly so huge that my body couldn’t contain it."
"I’d depended on that twice-daily chat, on the twice-daily sound of his voice."
"I needed to talk to him. I would have given everything I possessed, just to talk to him for five minutes."
"I’m trying to get far enough down the line so that I can remember without the pain killing me."
"I’d been thinking about other people who’d had horror visited upon them. Often they go on to live what looked like normal lives."
"We get no lessons in dealing with death, even though it happens to everyone, even though it’s the only thing in life we can depend on."
"It’s only a word—nothing to be frightened of!"
"She says she was sad for me, but that she was happy where she was."
"You never knew him. He died shortly after you were born, he says."
"He knew it was hard but that I had to try to stop thinking of her as a life interrupted."
"I like new clean modern things, not smelly old yokes riddled with woodworm."
"When you’ve dislocated one, it’s easy to remember what it’s called."
"I love Aidan. I’m devastated without him. I couldn’t even think of being with another man. Ever."
"We admitted we were powerless over our oily T-zone; that our skin had become unmanageable."
"I know how the full moon affects the tides… Stop, stop! You’re killing it for me."
"The sun might have been scared off by the thunder and lightning but mightn’t have actually set."
"I am going to punish you! Pull down your pants, you bad, bad man."
"I am responsible for my own happiness, but I surrender it to you; it is my gift to you."
"Before I met you, been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time."
"I think I'm going to give it a miss for a while."
"If he rang me in the cold light of day with nothing in his system other than Gatorade, I might talk to him."
"The only time you truly have it is when you genuinely don't care whether you have it or not."
"I felt like I was going to faint. The water was coming from under Jacqui’s skirt."
"Take it from me, I know how trashy that sounds."
"She has "never moved on." A flogging offense, to hear Rachel talk about it."