“My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.”
“I didn’t want to be prideful anymore. I wanted to be as hard as and brittle as the stones I carted into the woods. Stones that could not feel or cry or see. I wished not to feel anything at all.
In no time, what I wished for, I became.”
“She was so busy forgetting, she couldn't take a single step into the future.”
“I wasn't good company, that was true, and people avoided me, but that was all right. I was too busy dreaming.”
“I understood wanting to forget. Things that made you remember cut like pieces of glass.”
“No one called out my name. Finally, I went to open the door. I could smell burning metal.”
“One day she would surely vanish altogether, and there was no way to stop her. She was so busy forgetting, she couldn't take a single step into the future”
“I had lost my mother and my father and my sister, and sometimes when I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window, I wondered if perhaps I hadn't lost myself as well”
“I was making a different sort of heart, one that was black, one that was protected by thorns, by bats, by raven's wings, by sorrow, by my aloneness, my armour”
“I thought about how it was impossible to forget, no matter how hard anyone might try.”
“If sparrows were meant to fly, and hawks to hunt, and greyhounds to run, then a boy such as Diamond was meant to search for his mother. If he didn't go, if he forgot or thought of himself first, then he wouldn't be Diamond.”
“I started to feel as though I were disappearing. Perhaps I myself was figment of my own imagination, a storm cloud, a wisp of smoke, a burning ember.”
“This Henry lived in Edinburgh, making him inaccessible and giving her something to do on the weekends — 'Oh, just flying up to Scotland, Henry's taking me fishing,' which is the kind of thing she imagined people doing in Scotland — she always thought of the Queen Mother, incongruous in mackintosh and waders, standing in the middle of a shallow brown river (somewhere on the outskirts of Brigadoon, no doubt) and casting a line for trout.”
“To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.”
“Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.”
“I’m sure as hell not going to fight over her. I got more interesting things to do than that.
There’s nothing more interesting than a woman, George. Not in this world.”
“Who will see you through the darkness? "Me," I key in the answer. "I'll find my own way.”
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