Milkman Quotes
"Violence was everybody's main gauge for judging those around them."
"I knew by this second meeting that the milkman was attracted to me."
"I did not like the milkman and had been frightened and confused by his pursuing."
"I suppose now, looking back, this milkman knew all of that as well."
"I could bear the cluttered state of 'Come in and welcome, but you're going to have to squeeze a little'."
"I didn’t own this territory so that meant he was allowed to run in it just as much as I was."
"Intense nosiness about everybody had always existed in the area."
"Usually I managed not to fall into that. But I was angry."
"I stopped visiting even though she was sad because I could no longer take his words."
"Life's hard for everybody. It's not just for them it's hard so why should they get preferential treatment?"
"These people with the moods and heavy matter should realise is that life's hard for everybody."
"You've got to take the rough with the smooth, get on with life, pull yourself together, be respected."
"There's no rhyme or reason for it, daughter. It's imaginary – that’s its provenance, meaning it has no provenance."
"Some locations are just stuck. And deluded. Like some people."
"Everything had to be physical, had to be intellectually reasonable in order to be comprehensible."
"Knowledge didn’t guarantee power, safety or relief and often for some it meant the opposite of power, safety and relief."
"Purposely not wanting to know therefore, was exactly what my reading-while-walking was about."
"Implement a choice, dear class. Come out from those places. You never know the moment of the fulcrum, the pivot, the turnaround."
"They were important, a balancing act, an interface, a safety buffer against instant, face-to-face, mortal clashes."
"To stay it, to evade it, to push away those bad memories, all that pain and history and deterioration of character, you hear the barking."
"But they killed the dogs, taking out the middlemen, and so, until such times as new dogs were to be born and bred."
"Mostly it was silence. Or at first silence, with one dog – initially considered the last surviving dog in the district."
"‘Mammy! The heads! They took the heads! Where are the heads?’ we cried."
"Then the last surviving dog began to howl as well. There were many of us that day, many children, and we huddled and clung to our adults."
"They disentangled the heavy sogginess and the swampiness to differentiate one body from another body."
"‘The dogs are moving! MAMMY! THE DOGS ARE MOVING!’ and I looked and they were moving, tiny heavings up and down."
"‘They are not moving,’ said the adults, then finally, we became too much in our hopeful despair."
"So brother and I were led home, away from that entry, with our older sisters’ arms about us."
"Lassie was no pedigree, as none of these dogs had been pedigree. She had no qualifications, no certificates."
"That evening after dinner, still nine years old, I set out on my latest adventures, passing that same entry."
"So the soldiers killed the dogs, and the locals killed the cats, and now cats were also being killed by the Luftwaffe."
"It carried on accompanying me until I found myself stopping and turning round."
"Its face now fully upwards, I saw it was recognisable still as a cat, bigger eyes perhaps, or bigger sockets."
"‘Change one thing, class, just one thing, and I assure you, everything else will change also’."
"I knew by now, regarding me, that he had a plan, some workable agenda."
"‘You’re a mad person.’ Once more this was me talking to myself after the milkman had left me."
"I realised I was already out of the ten-minute area and had walked up as far as the usual place."
"Real milkman, the man beyond-the-pale who was the man who didn’t love anybody, had turned up that evening by the graveyard to help me."
"I didn’t explain how I’d come to have this head, or its link with the second world war or with the ten-minute area."
"These were many words to come out of me, also true words for there was no excusing of myself here, no asking for permission or for approval."
"I knew though, that my emotions had reached critical point over what had happened between me and the milkman, also over holding this head for too long."
"‘I won’t pretend and I won’t throw it away,’ he said."
"Real milkman, solemn, austere, yet here he was, giving me his time, bringing me hope, listening to me, taking me seriously."
"‘You never know,’ they said, ‘what might be considered the most sought-after paraphernalia of these sadnesses in years to come.’"
"Life being short, sometimes incredibly short, why bring upon yourself accusations of collusion, of being an accessory, of implications in conduct unbecoming an inhabitant of the area?"
"It was clear to everybody though, that first sister was too much in her own issues over her dead ex-lover so that hardly she was holding it together herself."
"It was clear to me, that as well as my not telling him about the milkman and the stories doing the rounds in my community about me and the milkman, maybe-boyfriend had his own defensive front of silence."
"Under stress we were starting to fight and were communicating less with each other than the normal amount of sharing of ourselves that we didn’t tend to communicate before."
"It seemed further proof of how far his mind was dwindling, his good sense slipping."
"That experience of relaxing into it, of walking out the door and slipping the book out of the pocket, of sinking into the paragraph coming up after the recently left-off paragraph, had changed since the stalking."
"That way she got you, her next victim, hooked and involved."
"All the same, I myself didn’t want an ambulance, didn’t want the hospital."
"And it was at that moment the realisation of tablets girl’s death came through."
"That was what she wanted. Very deft, very furtive, very making herself invisible, blending into everything, dissolving away to nothing."
"This was news to me. I hadn’t known there were drab aunts in the area, that the renouncers would permit them or be unable to stop them."
"People had no idea how to gauge them, how to categorise them, how to begin a discussion on them, and that was because only political murders happened in this place."
"She had accused her sister of being some unacceptable aspect of herself."
"This was my one bit of power in this disempowering world."
"You don't need me to tell you that everything you see is a reflection of your inner landscape."
"It's incumbent upon us to list your fears lest you forget them: that of being needy; of being clingy; of being odd."
"You must have said something, and why must I have? That's what she does."
"If she'd killed you! What if your sister'd killed you! You could have died and I would never have..."
"You broke my heart. You made me miserable. You made you miserable."
"I knew it was guilt. That explains your brother's behavior, his furtiveness in sneaking into the area."
"Are you really sure you wanna go down that road?"
"As for telling out, it boded no good to tell, I had decided, for look, hadn't I just started to open up and there he was, getting into a fight over it?"
"She said I had bombs, called me married and a befouler, then she hung up and wouldn't let me speak to you."
"I evaluated these guys right back and came to the conclusion it was they who weren't good enough for me."
"How dare he say ‘don’t bother explaining’ as if I was bothering him constantly, wearing him to the bone with attempts at explanations."
"It’s the sort of quiet, out-of-sync thing you would do."
"Always you’ve been hard to second-guess, but now you’re impossible."
"Perhaps we should stop now though, before this gets even worse."
"I knew what was coming and that it was going to happen."
"It was only undeniable to the same extent that they also meant their threatened betrayal."
"I wasn’t happy he was dead, not glad – or maybe I was, for really, why should not I be?"
"Breaking credibility, I was coming to understand, seemed to be what life was about."
"It was unworkable, but not just for the police was it unworkable."
"He supposed he could make up the shortfall with skipping or extra squats and lunges later at the boxing club."
"They had extra bottles with them, plus shopping, lots of boutique and shopping-mall shopping, all from some retail-barcrawl onslaught they’d been on all day in town."
"No impact whatsoever. After that, they started in on me."
"‘Ach,’ was what I did say which, depending on the context, can mean anything at all."
"‘NEVER LIFT A FINGER TO A WOMAN’ – if ever it had existed – third brother-in-law’s teeshirt, to everyone’s embarrassment, would have said."
"‘Ach sure, of course that’s how I feel.’ ‘Ach, all right then.’ ‘Ach,’ he said. ‘Ach,’ I said. ‘Ach,’ he said. ‘Ach,’ I said. ‘Ach.’"
"As we jumped the tiny hedge because we couldn’t be bothered with the tiny gate to set off on our running, I inhaled the early evening light and realised this was softening, what others might term a little softening."