English Quotes

• "After that his father had given up. Both trips etched vividly into Chris's mind, like so many of the powerless indignities of childhood"'
• His mother has embellished past events to give them a patina of something richer and happier
• She's finally given up knitting baby clothes
• Behind the warmth in her tone he can hear the steely undercurrent she'd used on him as a child to make him do as he was told
• "I don't understand why you can't just stay" She'll say petulantly.
• 'seeing your mother there in the pictures, gripping her two girl, your father nowhere-just a peripheral shadowy shape, stretched thin'
• You can feel it in the way your mother's hand drops onto your shoulders The pressure that pushes you down, which says, just you wait.
• Each morning of the school holidays, you feel a faint, smothered panic that the pool will sooner or later be the subject of attack
• Her tenderness felt as treacherous and irresistible as a tide
• the way she looks your father in the face to say it, her touch on his arm as she goes past, makes something turn over in your stomach, cold and glassy
• 'This is how you do it, I think, stick by careful stick over the ashes, oxygen and fuel, a controlled burn'
• three kids glued to the TV, something that's been happening a lot
• it morphs pretty quickly into orders. I mean, why there? Just where you can keep your eye on everything, like central control?
• hands turning me carefully over, carefully but somehow not gently, hands which so clearly conveyed that they wished themselves gone
• Christmas designed by Disney and Mattel. - everything replaced except, in the middle of it all, the baby
• "dissolves into a hoot of laughter then a coughing fit, and I reach down and grab his frail hand again till its over"'
• "What about you going off to London and all?" "I'll just go a bit later than I planned, It's not like it's going anywhere"
• "I never wanted to live past seventy five" "till the day I turned seventy four"
• "weightless" he says finally "completely weightless"
• "Your bloods worth bottling"
• "Your partner dies, and everyone comes over with casseroles - Your partner leaves, and apparently you need avoiding"'
• "I don't know about you, but I don't need to talk. I need someone else to talk. I need answers."
• "I don't know why they call it surfing. They should call it drowning"
• "Running from something that's it. Can't he see the symbolism"
• "Links are what you're after; linked hands, connections, answers, the web is like a big stretched safety net"