Quotes from The Girl With Glass Feet

“Have you ever hoped for something? And held out for it against all the odds? Until everything you did was ridiculous? ”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“One day, I learned that a single look can change everything. And since then I have seen it countless times. I have grappled to understand it and failed. For instance, all it took was a look from another man for my wife to fall out of love with me. It baffles me that a simple alignment of eyes can cause so much devastation.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“It didn’t take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“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.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“Writing is like going underwater - thank you for being there when I come back up.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“I should take a photo.'
'No. Just remember it, and us in it.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“He imagined dying and being cut open and there were all his bones and muscles and his bared arteries and capillaries leading to a cavity in his chest where instead of a heart he had his camera.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“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.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“Carefully, he reached around her with both arms so his fingers locked across her back.
'You have to squeeze,' she whispered, 'or it's not a hug.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“Sometimes I just can't stop thinking enough to turn off.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“The sunset like a blacksmith, was beating the sky into glowing red blades.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“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.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“Sometimes Midas suspected that life was a film with subliminal messages. Things would move along with an acceptable degree of predictability, then be punctuated by some horrible childhood memory.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“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.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“Memories were just photos printed on synapses.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“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?”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“Dust particles panicked and swarmed in the light.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“Perhaps you think too hard about what words you're going to use and how to make your mouth say them.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“As if you could terminate love abruptly because the one you loved signed papers with someone else in a church.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“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.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“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.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“She sometimes wished she possessed the flawed kind of taste that drew girls to arseholes who wanted that one thing alone.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“The woods felt like a sleeping monster worth tiptoeing past.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“Besides, he didn't have enough intact heartstrings to hand them to people to pull.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“Wenn du in's Fettnäpfchen getreten bist und jemand dir freundlicherweise die Hand hinstreckt, um dich da rauszuholen, dann solltest du die Hilfe vielleicht annehmen, anstatt dich auch noch darin zu wälzen.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“Beeches stood aghast in pools of shed leaves. Silver poplars looked like moonbeams.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“Was she horrid to you? I hate her if she was horrid.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“It was the touch that made him realize he loved her. Warmth from her scalp. Grease from her locks. He entwined his hand in her hair. It shrank through his moving fingers like sand. They lay together for a long time. Somewhere outside, a dog barked. He could barely believe he had lived so long without wanting to touch. Photography had made him forget the necessity of this feeling.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“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 vapors. The ball of her foot was glass too, but murkier, losing its transparency in a gradient until, near her ankle, it reached skin: matte and flesh toned like any other.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

“I should take a photo.”
“No. Just remember it, and us in it.”
He swallowed.
She smiled. Here was rightness of place and time.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet

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Popular quotes

“It's curious and ridiculous how much the gaze of a prudish and painfully chaste man touched by love can sometimes express and that precisely at a moment when the man would of course sooner be glad to fall through the earth than to express anything with a word or a look.”
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“Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.”
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“Put your glasses on mate ….. Come down from there, you’re gonna kill yourself …. Well, what does your Method Statement say? …. Right, let’s get you re-inducted. You need a reminder of site rules ….. Where are your outriggers, mate? ….. Put your glasses on ….. Put your glasses on …. Put your glasses on …. Oh, they steam up, do they? I’ve never heard that one before …. Where’s your mask? If you breathe this shit in you’re going to kill yourself. Silicosis is incurable ….. Right STOP! Do not reverse another inch without a banksman ….. Don’t put your glasses on just because you see me walk around the corner. They won’t protect MY eyes …. Hook yourself on, what’s the matter with you? Are all you scaffolders superhuman or something? ….. Put your glasses on ….. Oi! What stops me walking right in there? Where’s your barriers and signage? ….. Oi! I’m getting showered in fucking sparks here. And so is that can of petrol ….. Put your glasses on …. Where’s the flashback arrestor on this bottle of propane? ….. Hey, pal, stop welding until you’ve sheeted up ….. What are you doing climbing up there? Where’s your supervisor? What did he say about access in this morning’s Safe Start briefing? Nothing? Right, he can sit through another induction tomorrow ….. Where are the retaining pins to the joint clamps in this concrete pump line? SEAMUS! Fucking deal with this, will you? ….Put your glasses on …. Hey! Hey! Come here! Why have you got a nail instead of an ‘R’ clip to the quick-hitch system on your excavator bucket? NO! IT WON’T DO! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? If that bucket falls on someone they’re not going to get up again. And you trust a fucking nail to hold it in position! Take this machine out of service immediately until you’ve got the proper ‘R’ clip! ….. Put your glasses on …. Where’s the edge protection. Who removed the edge protection? Right, let me phone for a scaffolder ….. Put your glasses on ….. Oi! Get out from under there! Never, ever stand underneath a suspended load. Even if all the equipment’s been inspected, which it obviously has, you can never trust the crane driver. He can be taken ill suddenly ….. Come here, mate, let’s have a little chat. Why are you working on Fall Arrest? You’re supposed to be working on Fall Restraint (FR ‘restrains’ you going near the perimeter edge of the building, FA ‘arrests’ your fall if, well, if you fall. If you’re hanging off a building we’ve got less than ten minutes to reach you before you start going into toxic shock brought on by suspension trauma. In other words, we need a Rescue Plan, which is why we’d prefer people work on Fall Restraint)”
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