Quotes from Under the Skin

“Shared suffering, she’d found, was no guarantee of intimacy.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“Most distracting of all, though, was not the threat of danger but the allure of beauty.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“The word troubled her, though. ‘Indispensable.’ It was a word people tended to resort to when dispensability was in the air.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“she and they were all the same under the skin, weren’t they?”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“In the end, though, vodsels couldn't do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn't siuwil, the couldn't mesnishtil,they had no concept of slan.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“You know,’ Amlis went on, ‘Some water fell out of the sky not so long ago.’ His voice was a little higher than usual, vulnerable with awe. ‘It just fell out of the sky. In little droplets, thousands of them close together. I looked up to see where they were coming from. They seemed to be materializing out of nowhere. I couldn’t believe it. Then I opened my mouth to the sky. Some droplets fell straight in. It was an indescribable feeling. As if nature was actually trying to nurture me.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“The variety of shapes, colours and textures under her feet was, she believed, literally infinite. It must be. Each shell, each pebble, each stone had been made what it was by aeons of submarine or subglacial massage. The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the unfairness of human life into perspective.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“Strange how a specimen like him, well cared for, healthy, free to roam the world, and blessed with a perfection of form which would surely have allowed him to breed with a greater selection of females than average, could still be so miserable. By contrast, other males, scarred by neglect, riddled with diseases, spurned by their kind, were occasionally known to radiate a contentment that seemed to arise from something more enigmatic than mere stupidity.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“They both sat in silence for the rest of the journey, as if conscious of having let each other down.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“I sometimes think that the only things really worth talking about are the things people absolutely refuse to discuss.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“MERCY. It was a word she’d rarely encountered”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“it was already tomorrow. She should have known from the beginning that it would end like this.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“Isserley walked along the path the generations of sheep-flocks had made, up the tiers of the hill. In her mind, she was already”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“Unreality was swirling all around her like the delirious miasmas”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“was a female. Isserley wasn’t interested in females, at least not in that way. Let them get picked up by someone else. If the hitcher was male, she usually went back for another look, unless he was an obvious weakling. Assuming he’d made a reasonable impression on her,”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“oh how she wondered, what she looked like to him, in his alien innocence.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“The walls shrugged themselves loose from their foundations and slid towards the centre of the room, as if attracted by the struggle. The ceiling, a massive rectangular slab of concrete furrowed with fluorescent white, also shuddered loose and loomed down on her.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“protective of his gleaming domain, beavering away in it alone like an obsessed scientist in a humid and luridly lit laboratory.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“Vess Incorporated had simply dug them out of one hole and buried them in another”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“could indicate the cocky self-awareness of a male in prime condition.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“Well, I did my best,' said Amlis, in a self-deprecating purr. 'But I can tell when a challenge is hopeless. Anyway, it's not your minds I need to change.' And he glanced round at the contents of the ship's hull, acknowledging the scale of the slaughter and its commercial purpose.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“behaving as if his actions didn’t need defending. Typical rich kid, typical pampered little tycoon. None of their actions ever needed defending, did they?”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“Her invisible remains would combine, over time, with all the wonders under the sun. When it snowed she would be part of it, falling softly to earth, rising up again with the snow's evaporation, When it rained, she would be there in the spectral arch that spanned from firth to ground. She would help to wreathe the fields in mists, and yet would always be transparent to the stars. She would live forever.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

“She couldn’t quite believe it, even after all these years. It was a phenomenon of stupendous and unjustifiably useless extravagance. Yet here it lay, soft and powdery, edibly pure.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin

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Popular quotes

“He lifted the picture for a closer look and saw himself among a group of men, tossing a baseball from bare right hand to gloved left hand. The flight of the ball had always made this photo mysterious to Francis, for the camera had caught the ball clutched in one hand and also in flight, arcing in a blur toward the glove. What the camera had caught was two instants in one: time separated and unified, the ball in two places at once, an eventuation as inexplicable as the Trinity itself. Francis now took the picture to be a Trinitarian talisman (a hand, a glove, a ball) for achieving the impossible: for he had always believed it impossible for him, ravaged man, failed human, to reenter history under this roof. Yet here he was in this acne of reconstitutable time, touching untouchable artifacts of a self that did not yet know it was ruined, just as the ball, in its inanimate ignorance, did not know yet that it was going nowhere, was caught.
But the ball is really not yet caught, except by the camera, which has frozen only its situation in space.
And Francis is not yet ruined, except as an apparency in process.
The ball still flies.
Francis still lives to play another day.
Doesn't he?”
― William Kennedy, quote from Ironweed

“Nonetheless, he is a boy. Despite his talents, a boy. And a boy is more idealistic than a man, and high ideals in the hands of children can be as dangerous as weapons. He thought he was in the right, and because he thought he was in the right, he thought there would be an exception. That's that.”
― Adam Levin, quote from The Instructions

“So how did you two meet?” the sister asked in a sing-songy, playground-taunt voice. Marco responded viscerally to the tone.”
― Dayna Lorentz, quote from No Safety in Numbers

“Of course you wanted your children to have it better than you had. But at what point was it not better at all?”
― Philipp Meyer, quote from The Son

“The bathroom was jungle-fogged, flooded with puddles, piled with soaked towels; cakes of soap with long strands of blonde baked in.

A girl in pieces: Barbie-thin ankles, a shaving cut on her knee; hipbones she could stab you with; white hands gelled with strawberry body lotion.”
― Allyse Near, quote from Fairytales for Wilde Girls

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