“Reading is a bit like hallucinating.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“Mental illness turns people inwards. That's what I reckon. It keeps up forever trapped by the pain of our own minds, in the same way that the pain of a broken leg or a cut thumb will grab your attention, holding it so tightly that your good leg or your good thumb seem to cease to exist.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“She's known sadness. That's what it is. I only just thought that as I wrote it. She's known sadness, and it has made her kind.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“Some memories refuse to be locked in time or place, they are always present.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“I decided each name on each spine was the person who the book had been written for, rather than who had written it. I decided everyone in the world had a book with their name on, and if I searched hard enough I'd eventually find mine.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“Thinking about the past is like digging up graves”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“Hello, my name is your potential. But you can call me impossible. I am the missed opportunities. I am the expectations you will never fulfil. I am always taunting you, regardless of how hard you try, regardless of how much you hope. Please put talcum powder on my arse when you wash me, and take note of how our shit smells exactly the same.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“Writing about the past is a way of reliving it, a way of seeing it unfold all over again. We place memories on pieces of paper to know they will always exist.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“That's a fear when someone you love dies, isn't it? Especially if you're only young when it happens, you might worry that over time you’ll stop being able to picture them properly. Or that the sound of their voice will merge into other voices, so that you can no longer be sure how it was they sounded.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“The worst thing about this illness isn’t the things it makes me believe, or what it makes me do. It’s not the control that it has over me, or even the control it’s allowed other people to take.
Worse than all of that is how I have become selfish.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“But one thing I’ve learnt about people, is that they can always surprise you.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“if we meet each other in the street, glance away and look back, we might look the same, feel the same, think the same, but the subatomic particles, the smallest parts of us that make every other part, will have rushed away, been replaced at impossible speed. We will be completely different people. Everything changes all the time.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“I guess children believe whatever they want to believe. Perhaps adults do too.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“HELLO, my name is your potential. But you can call me impossible. I am the missed opportunities. I am the expectations you will never fulfil. I am always taunting you, regardless of how hard you try, how hard you hope.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“..think back through your own life, to when you were eight or nine years old. See if the memories you have are the ones you might expect. or if they are fragments, dislocated moments, a smell here, a feeling there. The unlikeliest conversations and places. We don't choose what we keep - not at that age. Not ever, really.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“I should write about why he left.
But there are different versions of truth. If we meet each other in the street, glance away and look back, we might look the same, feel the same, think the same, but the subatomic particles, the smallest parts of us that make every other part, will have rushed away, been replaced at impossible speeds. We will be completely different people. Everything changes all the time.
Truth changes.
Here are three truths.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“But that is what these people do - the Steves of this world - they all try and make something out of nothing. and they all do it for themselves.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“Words like guilt and shame and nightmares - the kind of nightmares that drag you from sleep, and leave you reaching for something no longer there.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“Try and remember that if you can. Hold onto it through everything else that happens in life, through all the things that might make you want to forget - keep it safe somewhere.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“That was sort of our family portrait. It's not the kind of thing you think you would miss. Maybe you don't even notice it at all those thousands of times, sitting between your mum and dad on the big green couch with your brother on the carpet getting in the way of the telly. Maybe you don't even notice that.
But you notice it when he isn't there anymore. You notice so many places where he isn't, and you hear so many of the things he doesn't say.
I do.
I hear them all the time.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“I guess there's a Use By date when it comes to blaming your parents for how messed up you are.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“There is weather and there is climate.
If it rains outside, or if you stab a classmate's shoulder with a compass needle, over and over, until his white cotton school shirt looks like blotting paper; that is weather.
But if you live in a place where is is often likely to rain, or your perception falters and dislocates so that you retreat, suspicious and afraid of those closest to you, that is climate.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“You only really know what a smile means when you own the face behind it. Everyone else just sees the smile they expect it to be.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“This is how we piece together our past. We do it like a jigsaw puzzle, where there are missing pieces. But so long as we have enough of the pieces, we can know what belongs in the gaps.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“Inside my head is a jigsaw made of trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms. It might take a while.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“Her brother has a disease, an illness with the shape and sound of a snake. It slithers through the branches of our family tree. It must have broken her heart, to know that I was next.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“He repeated the story he liked to tell us. The one with the small boy who was trying to lift a rock in his garden, and the boy’s dad was watching him heave and sweat and struggle, but get nowhere. Eventually the dad asks, ‘Why don’t you use all of your strength?’ And the boy says, ‘I am, Daddy. I am using all of my strength.’ And his dad says, ‘No you’re not. You haven’t asked me for help.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“Writing about the past is a way of reliving it, a way of seeing it unfold all over again. We place memories on pieces of paper to know they will exist. But this story has never been a keepsake – it’s finding a way to let go.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
“A good thing about talking to someone who is standing behind you is that you can pretend you don't know they're crying, and not trouble yourself too much with working out why. You can simply concentrate on helping them feel better.”
― Nathan Filer, quote from The Shock of the Fall
Nathan Filer
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“there are worse things than death or murder.” “Like what?” I asked. “Though it’s hard to comprehend,” he said, “the worst thing is to say to God that you don’t need him. Why? Because a dead person can be restored to life by God; a bereaved person can find peace from God; a person who has been violated can find God’s sustenance and strength and even see God conquer through the dark mystery of evil. In other words, there is recourse through these atrocities and tragedies. But to a person who says he or she doesn’t need God, what is the recourse? There is none.”
― Lee Strobel, quote from The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity
“But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language.”
― Pierre Boulle, quote from Planet of the Apes
“«Isarma!» mormorò lei. «Aiutami, e aiuta il bambino!» E come un eco si udirono quindi altre parole: «Possa il frutto della nostra vita essere vincolato a te con sigillo, o Madre, o Donna Eterna, che tieni la vita interiore di ciascuna tua figlia nelle mani posate sul suo cuore...» Nel contemplare il volto pallidissimo che aveva davanti, Viviana comprese che anche Ana aveva sentito quelle parole, e per un momento entrambe cessarono di essere madre e figlia per essere soltanto due donne, sorelle vincolate l'una all'altra e alla Grande Madre di vita fin da prima che i Saggi giungessero dal mare.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, quote from The King Stag
“I don’t like cops. I mean, it’s all well and good that they’re out there defending us against anarchy and all, but most of the cops I’ve met are suspicious of everything and everyone. Every little thing needs to have a motive behind it. As a rule I find them cynical and too analytical, very one-plus-one-equals-two types. There’s no way a cop would take me at my word. I mean, I could just see myself walking up to the police counter and saying, ‘Hey, I have some information about a murder. I’m a psychic, so please take me seriously.’ They’d laugh in my face as they locked me up in the looney bin.
And what if I was right? What if the information I had did help them? You can bet that instead of taking my gift seriously they’d think I had something to do with the crime. No, I don’t want any part of it. There’s no way I can prove how I got my information, and cops are big on proof. They’d want some evidence as to how I knew such and such. Well, in my profession, proof is a hard thing to come by. I live in an intangible world. I don’t know why I know things, I just do, and that doesn’t translate well in the world of your average lawman.”
― Victoria Laurie, quote from Abby Cooper, Psychic Eye
“There are a dozen St. George soldiers hiding in that maze,” my trainer said. “All hunting you. All looking to kill you. Welcone to Phase Two of your training, hatchling.”
― Julie Kagawa, quote from Rogue
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The Demon's CovenantBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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