Ali Shaw Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Was she horrid to you? I hate her if she was horrid.

Ali Shaw

#3. As if you could terminate love abruptly because the one you loved signed papers with someone else in a church.

Ali Shaw

#4. The sky was something she'd so often dreamed of while the hoo-ha of the Sunday service carried on around her. There seemed to her infinitely more God to be found by staring up at the never-ending universe than by looking glumly around a building of bricks and stone.

Ali Shaw

#5. The woods felt like a sleeping monster worth tiptoeing past.

Ali Shaw

#6. Memories were just photos printed on synapses.

Ali Shaw

#7. Beeches stood aghast in pools of shed leaves. Silver poplars looked like moonbeams.

Ali Shaw

#8. Sometimes someone else's life can be the only thing that makes sense of your own.

Ali Shaw

#9. Dust particles panicked and swarmed in the light.

Ali Shaw

#10. Writing is like going underwater - thank you for being there when I come back up.

Ali Shaw

#11. She sometimes wished she possessed the flawed kind of taste that drew girls to arseholes who wanted that one thing alone.

Ali Shaw

#12. Perhaps you think too hard about what words you're going to use and how to make your mouth say them.

Ali Shaw

#13. The winds shook off in unison and yipped beneath the gleaming stars.
She gave him her lips. They kissed.
And she was in love with the thunder.

Ali Shaw

#14. 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

#15. Sometimes I just can't stop thinking enough to turn off.

Ali Shaw

#16. She guiltily found she didn't miss him as much as she missed company in general.

Ali Shaw

#17. 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

#18. Besides, he didn't have enough intact heartstrings to hand them to people to pull.

Ali Shaw

#19. It didn't take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory.

Ali Shaw

#20. He said human beings were like a wind blowing. He said that sometimes we're loud and sometimes we're a whisper, sometimes we're warm and sometimes we're frighteningly cold. But however we blow, we blow onwards, and leave no sign of us behind.

Ali Shaw

#21. It's survival of the fittest, not the strongest or the biggest.

Ali Shaw

#22. 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

#23. One of the terrifying things about my life is that it belongs to me. It has never been lived before, nor will it ever be again. Every second is a brand-new possession.

Ali Shaw

#24. The first time she'd lured her ex to a restaurant it had been all she could do to snap him out of the reverie he entered, only for him to emerge spouting nonsense about how she was a princess, a goddess, even a fucking mermaid one time he called her.

Ali Shaw

#25. Have you ever hoped for something? And held out for it against all the odds? Until everything you did was ridiculous?

Ali Shaw

#26. 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

#27. The sunset like a blacksmith, was beating the sky into glowing red blades.

Ali Shaw

#28. I should take a photo.'
'No. Just remember it, and us in it.

Ali Shaw

#29. 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

#30. Light didn't conduct truth as once he'd thought. There was nothing you could do to preserve truth. Light was only of use as a metaphor for the ungraspable moment.

Ali Shaw

#31. In a flash of anger, Midas grabbed a sod of earth and hurled it at the water, which broke into a hundred chained circles. Picturing Ida like the body in the bog made his heart seem to wilt and blow away. His face screwed through expressions.

Ali Shaw

#32. 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

#33. She dwelled for a moment on a memory from girlhood: smearing her tummy with a spiral of glue, then tipping a whole pot of opal across it.

Ali Shaw

#34. 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