Sarah Winman Quotes

Emotions embarassed her except when she sang. My dad said that was exactly why she sang.

I said to him that just because you can't remember, doesn't mean the past isn't out there. All those precious moments are still there somewhere.

I divide my life into two parts. Not really a Before and After, more as if they are bookends, holding together flaccid years of empty musings, years of late adolescent or the twentysomething whose coat of adulthood simply does not fit.

We haven't got to the Sunflowers yet, said Michael.
No, we haven't, she said. You're right. OK, so Vincent hoped to set up an artists' studio down there in the South because he was keen to have friends and like-minded people around him.
I think he was probably lonely, said Michael. What with the ear thing and the darkness.
I think he was, too, said Dora. 1888 was the year, and he was waiting for another artist to join him, a man called Paul Gauguin. People say that, in all probability, he painted the Sunflowers as decoration for Gaugain'S room. Did lots of versions of them too, not just this. It's a lovely thought, though, isn't it? Some people say it's not true but I like to think it is. Painting flowers as a sign of friendship and welcome. Men and boys should be capable of beautiful things.
Never forget that, you two, she said, and she disappeared into the kitchen.

You're a Doer, my love. That's why God made you so big. So you could do everything yourself. Girls like you don't quit til you're dead. That should be a comfort.

I'd been feeling like this for a while, the continual looking back, the stuckness of it all. I blamed it on the coming New Year, only four and a half months away, when the clocks would read zero and we would start again, could start again, but I knew we wouldn't. Nothing would. The world would be the same, just a little bit worse.

She trekked back across the meadow and down through the trees in possession of the oldest secret known to man. She sat on the mooring stone and surrendered immediately to the down of night. She hadn't slept long before she suddenly jolted awake. Thought she had heard the sweet call of a lark ascending. Unaware that it was actually the sound of her soul awakening.

We were the centre of that liquid universe, for we were the night sun and we said to ships, do not come too close, we have rocks at our feet. And the crash of waves sent white spray flying, and I am scared and exhilarated and a little bit in love too.

You can hold onto anything to make you carry on.

I thought that probably I was worth more when I was younger.

But it was my humanness that led me to seek, that's all. Led us all to seek. A simple need to belong somewhere.

So, thought Peace, there was a wall around his heart and she wondered whether she should hoist up her skirt and scale that wall, but she knew she didn't have the right shoes on for that sort of climb because hers were too sensible for a man like Drake.

If we can accept the laws of the universe, the ebb and flow of joy and tragedy, then we have everything we need to embrace our true freedom.

Pity you if you thought it was overrated. I would've fucking revelled in it.

And my father went back into the forest and chopped down a tree. The sound of the trunk fracturing and splintering and falling to earth was the sound his heart would have made, could it speak.

There was no point in tears outliving eyes, so she let them fall.

You have to risk failure to become excellent.

He started to do that, started to inform me of everything; the inconsequential, the meaningful; conversations that ended in a cul-de-sac of unanswerable rhetoric. i think it was because I knew everything about him, had read it all - the beautiful, the sordid, the all of his book. I had been his editor for 5 years, and now it seemed, had become his editor away from the printed page.

I was used to waiting for her. As a child I'd waited for hel all the time, but it never annoyed me because I didn't have the one thing that unfailingly stole hours from her life. 'Sorry I'm late' she used to say. 'It was my hair again. And she spoke of it as if it was an affliction like asthma or a limp or a problem heart, one that slowed her down

Popularity, my dear, is as overrated as a large member.

Love. It's the only thing to have faith in ... Or the moon. Soemthing that turns up every day when you cant. The sun. The moon. Anything. You have to have faith in something.

Memories no matter how small or inconsequential are the pages that define us.

But when she had entered the gallery room, the storm shutters around her heart flew open and she knew immediately that this was the life she wanted: Freedom. Possibility. Beauty.

Truth, as he always said, was overrated, nobody ever won prizes for telling the truth.

No atheists at sea, Drake. When the waves are the size of mountains even the godless kneel.

Think about it, I said. We all had to come out of the dark to sing.

The principles of catching rumours were, in fact, similar to the principals of catching dreams, but because rumour was weightier, the catcher had to be positioned closer to the ground. Rumour flew low, dreams flew high, and somewhere in between were prayers.

My father believed it was a cancerous lump, not because my mother was genetically prone to such a thing, but because he was looking out for the saboteur of his wonderful life.

never stop playing

It was the final chapter of his breakdown, the moment when his glass drained of everything, and its emptiness awaited only for choices to come.

I pulled the blanket around my shoulders. The sky was dark and vast and empty and not even a plane disturbed that sullen stillness, not even a star. The emptiness above was now mine within. It was a part of me, like a freckle, like a bruise. Like a middle name now one acknowledged.

He said it was as if she punctured his skin and entered his veins and swan directly to his heart.

And I wonder what the sound of a heart breaking might be. And I think it might be quiet, unperceptively so, and not dramatic at all. Like the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.

But what are we looking for?"
"You'll know when you find it.

Love just enough. What's enough? Enough to hold. When it hurts, you're loving too much. Just enough to hold. Anything more than a handful and you're in trouble.

Those left behind prayed constantly for peace but prayers came back with Return to Sender stamped all over them. Only the roll call of the dead grew.

..How the numbness in my fingertips travelled to my heart and I never even knew it.

I had crushes, I had lovers, I had orgasms. My trilogy of desire, I liked to call it, but I'd no great love after him, not really. Love and sex became separated by a wide river and one the ferryman refused to cross.

Autumn knocks on the window. I pull back the sliding doors and let it in. Lights from the meat market flicker and car lights streak the gloom. Overhead the pulse of aeroplane wings replaces the stars. The flat is quiet. This is loneliness.

We love who we love, don't we?

Memories" she said to me "no matter how small or inconsequential, are the papers that define us

And he uncovered in us a curious need: that we each secretly wanted him to remember us the most. It was strange, both vital and flawed, until I realised that maybe the need to be remembered is stronger than the need to remember.

She was of another world; different. But by then, secretly, so was I.

Things happen. To everyone. No one escapes.

I just want my friend back, I have become forgettable

I'm going to run away," she said.
"Where to?"
"Atlantis," she said.
"Where's that?"
"No one really knows where it is," she said. "But I'll find it and then I'll go and then they'll worry.

..And now look. Life changes in ways we can never imagine. Walls come down and people are free. You wait, she says.

I wrote about ... my childhood, when dreams were small and attainable for all. When sweets were a penny and god was a rabbit.

It would be as if the sun itself rose every morning on that wall, showering the silence of their mealtimes with the shifting emotion of light.

No amount of self-sufficiency could dispel the craving he still felt for that person we no longer talked about; that person who'd taken him apart and left a piece missing that none of us could find.

The first thing we need to find,' said Mr Golan, 'is a reason to live'.
...
'Without a reason, why bother? Existence needs purpose: to be able to endure the pain of life with dignity; to give us a reason to continue. The meaning must enter our hearts, not out heads. We must understand the meaning of our suffering.

I walked out and breathed fresh air. I felt the sun on my skin. The world is a different place when you are well, when you are young. The world is beautiful and safe. I said hello to the gatekeeper. He said hello back to me.

The choir sang and the old man sang and Drake couldn't sing, and suddenly he began to cry because of the music, because of the sound of the boys' voices, because of what they might turn into.

[My mum] was always like that: grateful for life itself. Her glass was not only half full, it was gold plated with a permanent refill.

Don't worry. It'll all come good in the end. Always does.

There's something about first love, isn't there? she said. It's untouchable to those who played no part in it. But it's the measure of all that follows.

Everything was real, not perfect. And yet that's what had made it so perfect.

I haven't cried. But sometimes I feel as if my veins are leaking, as if my body is overwhelmed, as if I'm drowning from the inside.

I'm broken by my need for others. By the erotic dance of memory that pounces when loneliness falls.

I was never in any danger," she said calmly. "Nothing can ever hurt me. Nothing can take me from me.