Rupert Thomson Quotes

#1. The fig tree had dropped its fruit all over the ground. Ripe figs lay in the dust, exploded, bloody, as if the sky had rained organs.

Rupert Thomson

#2. The strong man lit a cigarette. It looked too frail for his hand. They looked like King Kong and Fay Wray, that hand, that cigarette. There was a movie going on right under his nose and he didn't even know. The guy had about one brain cell and he was doing time in it.

Rupert Thomson

#3. He'd learned something. Life was booby-trapped and there was no easy passage through. You had to jump from colour to colour, from happiness to happiness. And all those possible explosions in between. It could be all over any time.

Rupert Thomson

#4. That's what birthdays were. Days when you found out where you stood. Who was on your side and who wasn't. Nothing to do with how old you were.

Rupert Thomson

#5. Her smiles were blurred, as if seen from a moving train. Her eyes always creased at the edges by dreams of leaving.

Rupert Thomson

#6. This would have once been a place for contemplation. He looked up at the towers surrounding him. Many of the dead bodies had been removed. Their places had been taken by the living.

Rupert Thomson

#7. He looked both proud and guilty of something. As if happiness was a reward and he wasn't sure he'd done enough to deserve it.

Rupert Thomson

#8. He was dropped under a streetlamp, the only person left on the bus. A patch of mauled light. Gritty pavement, scarred with a million cigarette burns. Weeds and spit and oil. Place like this, the only glitter was the knife just before it sank in. Place like this, there wasn't any gold.

Rupert Thomson

#9. She looked the way a rose petal looks when you crush it between finger and thumb.

Rupert Thomson

#10. At first he didn't know where he was, whose voice it was. He must have been asleep. And waking suddenly, like that, you woke in a thousand different places that you'd never been.

Rupert Thomson

#11. The earthquakes in people's heads, half the city's population was cracked, a rabble of doom-merchants, psychos, ghouls. They could smell a funeral a mile off, and out they crawled, out of the woodwork. A funeral lit them up, it was like fuel, it kept them burning for days.

Rupert Thomson

#12. It was as if Jed had moved from one dimension to another. His original dimension hadn't reported him missing, and his new dimension didn't acknowledge his presence. Maybe what he'd really done was end up somewhere between the two. Some days he almost felt invisible.

Rupert Thomson

#13. Jed was used to isolation. His face was like some kind of cul-de-sac. It said NO THROUGH ROAD to most people. Confronted with him, they always turned around, backed away.

Rupert Thomson

#14. There's love and everybody talks about it, but not all of us come close to it - or, if we do, it's not in the expected way.

Rupert Thomson

#15. His anger was still there, and he used it to break into her. He liked the way her eyes widened in alarm, as if he was forcing a lock, as if he was breaking and entering. It was the first time he'd ever slept with a woman and it felt like burglary.

Rupert Thomson