Ali Shaw Quotes

A girl sat neatly on a flat rock. Somehow he'd not seen her. She looked like she'd stepped through the screen of a 1950s movie. Her skin and blond hair were such pale shades they looked monochrome. Her long coat was tied at the waist by a fabric belt. She was probably a few years younger than him, in her early twenties, wearing a white hat with matching gloves. "Sorry," she said, "If I surprised you." Her irises were titanium gray, her most striking feature. Her lips were an afterthought and her cheekbones flat. But her eyes ... He realized he was staring into them and quickly looked away.

The sky was something she'd so often dreamed of while the hoo-ha of the Sunday service carried on around her. There seemed to her infinitely more God to be found by staring up at the never-ending universe than by looking glumly around a building of bricks and stone.

Writing is like going underwater - thank you for being there when I come back up.

She had felt a collision with him and known that she had wanted this her whole life: to crash for just one moment into another person at such a velocity as to fuse with him.

The winds shook off in unison and yipped beneath the gleaming stars.
She gave him her lips. They kissed.
And she was in love with the thunder.

He said human beings were like a wind blowing. He said that sometimes we're loud and sometimes we're a whisper, sometimes we're warm and sometimes we're frighteningly cold. But however we blow, we blow onwards, and leave no sign of us behind.

As if you could terminate love abruptly because the one you loved signed papers with someone else in a church.

It was just her and Midas in here, tucked away from the world. Here she could turn quietly into glass, with only love to distract her.

Light didn't conduct truth as once he'd thought. There was nothing you could do to preserve truth. Light was only of use as a metaphor for the ungraspable moment.

Her toes were pure glass. Smooth, clear, shining glass. Glinting crescents of light edged each toenail and each crease between the joints of each digit. Seen through her toes, the silver spots on the bed sheet diffused into metallic vapours.

I should take a photo.'
'No. Just remember it, and us in it.

She sometimes wished she possessed the flawed kind of taste that drew girls to arseholes who wanted that one thing alone.

The sunset like a blacksmith, was beating the sky into glowing red blades.

In a flash of anger, Midas grabbed a sod of earth and hurled it at the water, which broke into a hundred chained circles. Picturing Ida like the body in the bog made his heart seem to wilt and blow away. His face screwed through expressions.

Besides, he didn't have enough intact heartstrings to hand them to people to pull.

The woods felt like a sleeping monster worth tiptoeing past.

Sometimes someone else's life can be the only thing that makes sense of your own.

He'd been an odd one, that boy with the camera. Such a distinctive physique: pale skin so taut on his skeleton, holding himself with a shy hunch, not ugly as such but certainly not handsome, with a demeanor eager to cause no trouble, to attract no attention.

Was she horrid to you? I hate her if she was horrid.

His father looked wistful. 'And you don't feel anticlimatic?'
What's that?'
Somewhat the opposite of elated.'
What's elated again?'
Good feelings. That is to say, very good. You can feel, can't you? That's what I'm driving at. You don't ever wonder ... where feeling went?

One of the terrifying things about my life is that it belongs to me. It has never been lived before, nor will it ever be again. Every second is a brand-new possession.

She dwelled for a moment on a memory from girlhood: smearing her tummy with a spiral of glue, then tipping a whole pot of opal across it.

Memories were just photos printed on synapses.

It didn't take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory.

She guiltily found she didn't miss him as much as she missed company in general.

After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind.

Then there were the negatives. How he missed negatives. They were the actual rays of light, bounced straight off a landscape, an object, a person, and scarred on to the film. Photographic negatives were the hardest evidence you could get of your memories. They were the char left by the fire, the bruise left on your skin. The same light that carried to your eyes, on the day of your photograph, that image of your mother, or your father, or your close friend, had recorded itself on the film. And now, staring at the photo on the wall of Ida's transparent toes against the bed sheets, he thought how similar her feet were to negatives: both subjects of that half-world between memory and the present. These were not real, flexible, treading toes, but a play of light that showed where toes had been.