Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.
If I was made of cake I’d eat myself before somebody else could.
Everybody’s damaged by something.
People don’t always want to be with people. It gets tiring.
It’s called mind over matter. If we don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth.
But I go back down near the water with Steppa to look for treasure. We find a white shell like a snail, but when I curl my finger inside, he’s gone out. “Keep it,” say Steppa. “But what about when he comes home?
Alice says she can’t explain herself because she’s not herself, she knows who she was this morning but she changed several times since then.
It came to Mary now that her mother had been right, after all; Mary had been born for this. In sixteen years she’d shot along the shortest route she could find between life and death, as the crow flew.
I’ve seen the world and I’m tired now.
Was that hard-hearted? Well, so what if it was. She’d been through enough to harden anyone. It was none of her choosing; all she’d done was clung on to her life like a spar from a shipwreck. Better to be hardened than crushed to nothing.
Please,” he added. “I meant to say, please. I’ve thought it all through. I’ve thought of nothing else. I haven’t read a book in weeks!
So this was liberty. Mary was beginning to recognise the taste of it in her mouth: terror salting the sweetness.
I have tried to use memory and invention together, like two hands engaged in the same muddy work of digging up the past.
That’s tree persons in the room now and two of us, that equals five, it’s nearly full of arms and legs and chests. They’re all saying till I hurt. “Stop all saying at the same time.
In the year 1752 it was announced that the second of September would be followed by the fourteenth. The matter was merely one of wording, of course; time in its substance was not to undergo any change.
I tell you frankly, Mrs. Damer, the more I see of different nations, the less sure I feel about the pre-eminence of my own.