“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
Ali Shaw
Born place: The United Kingdom
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“I fall short of thy glory every day by spending hours unprofitably, by thinking that the things I do are good, when they are not done to thy end, nor spring from the rules of thy Word.
[From the prayer, Shortcomings]”
― quote from The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions
“Is there an option C? Take a vacation somewhere sunny, and drink a lot of rum until the world unfucks itself?”
― Devon Monk, quote from Magic to the Bone
“No repases tanto, Lobsang, que así se te atasca la memoria. Tienes que estar absolutamente tranquilo, como lo estás ahora, y verás cómo te brota el conocimiento”
― quote from The Third Eye
“Sex is . . . well, it’s so rude, isn’t it? You wouldn’t think girls would like sex. You’d think it’s too rude for them. Doing sex with a girl, it’s a bit like putting a frog down their backs or scaring them with dead mice or throwing worms at them. They’re such sensible, grown-up sorts of people. And yet apparently even the nice ones like you sticking the rudest thing you have on your whole body up the exact, rudest part of their body that they have. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me!”
― Melvin Burgess, quote from Doing It
“A few glasses of wine can be the difference between finding a man a hilarious companion or an insufferable moron.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The First Law Trilogy
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