A Slow Fire Burning Quotes
"The trouble with you, Laura, is that you make bad choices."
"Seriously, could you take me off speaker? I don’t want to hear her voice; it makes me want to set fire to things."
"So undignified, to ferry one’s shit about among strangers, dog-walkers, joggers."
"Nothing kills like contempt, and contempt for her came upon me in a hot flood."
"I'm sorry he's dead and everything, but I didn’t do anything."
"You’ve no self-worth, that’s your problem, Laura."
"This is a marriage, Janine, not a drama course."
"Christ’s sake, Laura, give me a minute, would you? Just one minute to myself?"
"You’d have thought she’d be able to recognize them by now."
"The experiment was not an unqualified success."
"I thought you didn’t remember, Carla thought, being in the taxi queue."
"She thought she might actually shit herself."
"You weigh nothing, Angie. Had you eaten anything before you went out?"
"She wondered how many there would be, how many people had seen her that morning, down on the towpath with blood on her lips."
"People assumed you couldn’t have much of a life without children, but they were wrong."
"When Irene considered it, she thought that she probably felt somewhere around thirty-five."
"There was a reason they used it as a form of torture—it robbed you of all capacity."
"Angela’s overwhelming memory of that night was of shame too."
"She didn’t bother to look at it—either it would be Theo or it would be the police, and she wasn’t in the right frame of mind to talk to either."
"The sensation shamed her again: it was like holding a child, like holding her sister when she’d been a little girl—tiny and fierce and funny."
"She released the phone from her shoulder grip and dropped it into her hand, looking at the screen to remind herself who she was talking to."
"Perhaps she could explain, though. Perhaps she could explain the whole fork thing to whoever would be, at some point, on the end of the line."
"Three days later, Jeremy’s car was found in a car park on a cliff in an area euphemistically referred to as a beauty spot, one of those places people go when they have nowhere left to run."
"Everyone felt sorry for Miriam. Everyone felt sorry for her, and nobody wanted to be anywhere near her."
"You might have done something else. No one would have expected you to. But you might have."
"A sudden downpour so heavy the raindrops drummed like hail against the flagstones."
"Can you imagine how you’d feel if someone took William’s watch from me?"
"I think you ought to go upstairs and get out of those wet things, hang them in the airing closet, and run yourself a nice hot bath."
"I always feel safe here, you know? I feel like no one can get at me here."
"No one’s going to get you, Laura. Why ever would you think that?"
"She’s on the edge of something, that one. And when she goes over, you don’t want to be anywhere nearby."
"This girl is a victim. This girl is grieving. This girl is damaged. This girl is vengeful. This girl is guilty?"
"Experimentation for its own sake, who did that serve?"
"There are some questions which you don’t want answered. Which you never want answered."
"Suspense is the agonizing thing, isn’t it? Now the suspense was over, now he knew what was going to happen, he felt better."
"She had no idea where she lived and, 'I’ve really no idea. As I say, my recall of these events is far from perfect. It was a stressful time. An emotional time.'"
"It was a clean kill. Not literally, of course—literally it made a terrible mess, but it was quick."
"Sometimes, when she found herself in a very dark place, she felt overwhelmed by the urge to confess."
"Told you I loved you, you beat my heart black and blue."
"Terrible as the afternoon had been, that wasn’t the worst of it."
"Strange expression, that, and yet it seemed apt."
"Well, bollocks, as Laura might say, to that."
"Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before."