Quotes from The Shock of the Fall

“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

Video

About the author

Popular quotes

“Life ... is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, quote from Macbeth (Wordsworth Classics)

“And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilised man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from Dama s psičkom

“I swallow, thinking I might pity myself a little bit right now, too. “He abducted me. He threatened my friends. He kept me tied to him with a magic rope. I couldn’t even pee by myself. He’s awful.” “You’ll get over it.” Jocasta cheerfully throws my own words back at me. “See you at dinner.”
― Amanda Bouchet, quote from A Promise of Fire

“Humans have a tendency to overcomplicate simple things because we overthink them. But if you take a step back and remember your priorities, it becomes easier to make a decision. When”
― Lilly Singh, quote from How to Be a Bawse: A Guide to Conquering Life

“I’m with you on measuring this week in letters and the two-day drought we are about to experience. If only there was a way to transport letters faster, through some sort of electronic device that codes messages and sends them through the air. But that’s just crazy talk.

Friday from me:

Sending letters through the sky? Like when airplanes attach notes to their tails? I thought they only advertised for going-out-of-business sales. But perhaps our letters would be okay up there as well. I wonder how much they charge per word.”
― Kasie West, quote from P.S. I Like You

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters 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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.