The Red House Quotes
"Seventy miles per hour, the train unzips the fields."
"Everything off-kilter, the bandage on the vicar’s hand, that woman chasing her windblown hat."
"The first spade of earth hit the coffin, a bubble rose in her chest."
"The edges of the paper browned and scalloped with a burning match."
"The squeak of trolley wheels and saw the bags of fluid."
"To be honest, it was Angela he was worried about."
"A man is trapped in a hot flat above the shipyard."
"Fear and loneliness will always taste like this."
"Eventually we find that we no longer need silence."
"They plunged into a tunnel and the windows thumped and clattered."
"The way she’d made herself so ostentatiously plain."
"The valleys gouged out by glaciers with their cargo of rubble."
"Everyone walking in the steps of those who walked before them."
"A bird of prey floated up the valley until it was swallowed by the green distance."
"The beauty kept slipping though her fingers."
"The world was so far away and the mind kept saying, 'Me, me, me'."
"The centuries would swallow us like the sky swallowing that bird."
"She looked at herself in the mirror and saw the animal that she was trapped inside."
"Places remained and time flowed through them like wind through the grass."
"Right now. This was the future turning into the past."
"You had to say as little as possible and let the other person fill the gaps."
"Peace and quiet, time to think. No lemon. But needs must, right?"
"Sometimes girls pretended they didn’t want to and it was so hard to turn back."
"I love it here. You know, the space, the view from up there."
"Materialism is the reason why most of the people in this room are actually alive."
"If you can’t be alone you join a gang, you drink instead of going home, you marry the first person who comes along because you’re scared of going back to an empty house."
"You crossed your own doorstep and took off the cape and you were Clark Kent again."
"We’re allowed to have friends who aren’t Christians."
"You come and tell me when you’ve worked out the answer."
"We advise guests to arrive during bar opening times so as to avoid waiting outside."
"Because she thinks she’s right and everyone else is wrong."
"And when I was someone else, then I knew who I was."
"The decrees of the Lord are firm, and all of them are righteous."
"I think being yourself is punishment enough."
"A brief passage of warmth and light between darkness and darkness."
"I am ignorant, I understand so little, I am only human."
"I’ll have to make an exception in your case."
"Fuck what Melissa thought, fuck what Mum and Dad thought."
"If you believed with all your heart then none of it mattered."
"What doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger."
"How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again."
"These were not her people, this was not her family."
"The most adult activity, yet it made you feel like a child again."
"Do your work, choose good friends and keep your promises."
"Fear and disgust, thinking how similar they might be after all."
"Nothing you can do, just wait for the time to pass."
"This gulf between them, a sudden flash of what Dad might be going through, of what he might have been going through for years."
"Reality. It meant nothing. It was the story that mattered, the story that held you together."
"The deep truths hidden in the throwaway phrase."
"Say it began with shadows, that it was shadows always."
"We are, I know not why, double within ourselves."
"He didn’t want to be a man. He wanted to run away with them."
"The fear that something genetic might rise and up and claim her if she wasn’t strong enough."
"The idea that he might not have a home to come back to."
"It’s the story that held you together, the satisfaction of turning those pages."
"You started the mower by pulling the plastic T on the end of the cord."
"The awful truth: to get ahead you need a private education."
"So many ways of being saved. So many cold dark places."
"She tries to make it sound funny but no one laughs."
"Everyone apart from Benjy and Melissa turns to one another, trying to gauge the expected warmth of the parting."
"Specks of rain. A red Datsun making its way up from Longtown."