A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

22 quotes ★ 3.48 (14,402) Fiction

Quotes from the Book

Hurt me. Until I am outside pain.

I am tired. Too full of stuff I've done. Where my legs hurt where my scalp hurts. I'll not fight the thing inside me anymore. Let it eat me up. Please God. I want it to.

Do you hear me? Is it ever time for you to understand. I meant I meant that for I never thought you could think you were low. Were lost at the moment when they cut you off. Cut your head out heart brain. It is not I know was not that but to me it was to me. Like I could have seen you in the bright of day. Like the light could have come up from the sea and take you over. Me over. Is there. Forgive that. Forgive that me that I was fallen down. That I was under the weather under the same sky and did not. Not yet. If I took. If I had taken your good right hand I might have pulled you. Up. Pulled the black sea out of us. Saw you. Left you. Is there some truth in that? I went out to the cold. Thought I'd know what to do. Bring you with me. Bring you with. Sad and sad and sad fool me slipping down. Slope hill mountainside. Muck and stones on me. On my feet and rain in my hair. I thought about it but I could not stop. Pushed it further in. Needle and syringe. This will take me out of that. Like it could. As though it might do in any way. Forgive me. Forgive me that that I didn't see. Look out my eyes. That I didn't know what I was doing though I did though I did. Oh do you love me. Can you love me. Do you love me still. My sins. My grievous. Woe my wrong. I went out to him and said do what you will if you want. If you're able will you save me from that. I put a pillow on my face on your face and I said suffocate. It could have been. It could have been that. If I chose if I didn't. If I knew what to do. I don't so by the way I'm telling you. I'm warning now what a monster I have become. Soap in my mouth my eyes my hair turning bitter at the smallest drop. Of the rain give me the rain and all that. Wash oh yes wash that's it wash away. My. Sin.

Board my body up. I’m not for loving. Anymore.

You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say.

For all of that I wanted to be out of it. All of that. You wanted to be in.

See. My one act. I might be a person. Beneath the.

We were moving off now. From each other. As cannot be. Helped. I didn't want it from that time on. You know. All that. When you said sit with me on the school bus. I said no. That inside world had caught alight and what I wanted. To be left alone. To look at it. To swing the torch into every corner of what he'd we'd done. Know it and wonder what does it mean. I learned to turn it off, the world that was not my own. Stop up my ears and everything. Who are you? You and me were never this. This boy and girl that do not speak. But somehow I've left you behind and you're just looking on.

And they clapped they loved they worshipped him. I picked up sticks out of my hair. Dirt up off my tongue. I felt the loving smears go in. The loving blood. I felt water rushing in my brain. I dead the heart. I am for you alone.

Do you love me? Can you love me even after that? Even now. I won't ask and I won't say that inside myself or ever out again. Forgive me brother. I know not what I do. Forgive me brother for I have sinned. We are all the things we'll ever be.

Besides it’s as nothing to the death of a child. He doesn’t mind telling you his faith was sorely tried. There’s no grief like a parent’s.

Right now. Next now. What I’ll be?

Have a smack. Was all that happened for years. And my head is good for secrets. I can bang it on the wall. It takes the nervous out and no one bothers for it at all.

There is no Jesus here these days just Come all you fucking lads. I’ll have you every one any day. Breakfast dinner lunch and tea. The human frame. The human frame. The human frame requires. Give them something. A good hock of spit for what it’s worth. They’ll say my name forever shame but do exactly what I say.

Who are you? You and me were never this. This boy and girl that do not speak. But somehow I've left you behind and you're just looking on.

I have cans. In my bag. Where do I? Out them there no don't put down or they'll go you'll be sorry. Money spent. I trup trup off behind her. Think I'm new and white. In the garden. In the wet. For grass still sucks it up all day. Where's this? Just some fella I know she says. He said come and bring a friend. Him and other lads have this band. Oh. Brilliant. Good too. They squat here. Christ. What do I know? What do I know? People living mad life but I'm around it now. I can't be in. I'm. What'd I'd say to those girls in school if. No. I won't. Won't be going back in there.

This wrong doubtful body should not have been mine. Mine was. Not this. Was perfect. Once. Drag the. I will and sit and drown if the. Come water. Over land. Swallow up. Swallow me down. Drag me in the gullys. In the pipes please and the drains.

Not as good as me in the back of my head. In my silent they’re not so clever not so quick and rule the world anyway as if it’s fair. Think I’m too good. I am but would not say it to their face. Lucky for them.

Goes goes the holy joes. Going to spread the good clean word. Going to say what a good death you have made. What a saintly. What a sad. Young one. Gathered to himself the very best. Left.

What you doing? Stop leave me. Jesus. Bit me. Below the neckline of the dress. The. Bite. Hurt that. My breast. Through the stupid white my bothered skin. See blood come. Rings I think of teeth flower. You. Don’t. You don’t. Again. My lovely girl my love my. He says. Look at me. I’ll always have you in the end. Because I love you. Shut up. Best. So so so so? Well fuck you then. He says. Wipe up that. Put your bra. Fucking state you’re in. Don’t know a man loves you. Don’t know. Fucking mental that you. Dirty cunt like him. Well I liked it and I fucked it and I wanted it some more. You fucking. Shut your. Caught my, the roots, in my scalp like they’ll rip me. Coming. Uncle loving coming. Coming. We to. Home.

For I am a woman now.

It’s love. It. Is. Love. Or love waiting for a man to come and take her place. But how would someone fit, I don’t know, in between us two.

About Eimear McBride

Eimear McBride was born in Liverpool in 1976 to Irish parents. The family moved back to Ireland when she was three, and she spent her childhood in Sligo and Mayo before moving to London at the age of 17. She began writing this debut novel while working a series of office temp jobs.

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About the book

Eimear McBride's debut novel, published in 2013, tells the story of an unnamed young woman growing up in a small town in Ireland and her relationship with her brother, whose life is shadowed by a childhood brain tumour. Written as a first-person interior monologue, the book plunges the reader inside its narrator's head, tracing a broad arc from her birth through a childhood and youth marked by a religious mother, a departed father, and predatory abuse. Rather than a conventional plot, it delivers a raw, first-hand experience of one consciousness under intense pressure.

At its core the novel explores family violence, transgressive sexuality, and the struggle to remain intact in times of severe trauma. It takes on classic Irish literary themes — a harsh, unforgiving religion, damaged families, the dying and the dead — and gives them a gritty new spin. McBride's fractured, fragmented style, which forgoes quotation marks and splinters sentences mid-thought, is inseparable from these themes: the broken language enacts the narrator's pre-verbal anguish and her attempt to drown mental pain with physical pain.

Though rejected by numerous publishers over nine years, the book was finally released by the tiny Galley Beggar Press of Norwich in an initial run of 1000 copies, then picked up by Faber and Faber in 2014. Critics hailed it as a landmark: Joshua Cohen in The New York Times called it "a future classic," James Wood in The New Yorker judged it "blazingly daring," and Anne Enright praised its hard-won intensity. It won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.