“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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“Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.
This is how you lose her.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“It felt a little as if we'd found a script that had been written just for us, and we were reading through the beginning quickly [...] hurrying so we could get to the part that mattered, whatever that was to be.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“Thank you," he finally said. He couldn't say he meant thanks for all of it: the keys, the trust, the honesty and the kisses. Hopefully Andrew would figure it out eventually. "You were amazing.”
― Nora Sakavic, quote from The King's Men
“For a long while I have believed – this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness – that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity.
And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainly, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval.
But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.
What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or a movie theater, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveler, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Ground Beneath Her Feet
“But sometimes it is just when everything seems to be lost that we experience a presentiment that may save us; one has knocked on all the doors which lead nowhere, and then, unwittingly, one pushes against the only one through which one may enter and for which one would have searched in vain for a hundred years, and it opens.”
― Marcel Proust, quote from Time Regained
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