K.L. Slater > Quotes

“It always amazes me how it is so easy to appear one way to the people around you but to live inside as someone else entirely.”
― K.L. Slater, Safe With Me

“You could say it feels a bit like dressing up in the brightest party clothes so nobody sees how low and lost you feel underneath. You'd be surprised how easy it is to hide your true feelings with a smile and a kind word.”
― K.L. Slater, Safe With Me

“You don't always know how you're going to react to a sudden tragedy breaking your life into little pieces.”
― K.L. Slater, Blink

“Why is that everyone can forget about physical ailments quite easily, but when it comes to mental illness, it sticks to you like glue for the rest of your life?”
― K.L. Slater, The Apartment

“Just give yourself permission to feel it all, Jenny. The sadness, the anger, the heartbreak… let it come. All your feelings are valid. You don’t have to choose between them.”
― K.L. Slater, The Girlfriend

“The pork is in the oven with the foil off now, and a quick satisfying peek confirms that the crackling will be done to perfection. Just how Ben likes it. The apple crumble, with my own special oaty topping, sits on the side, and I have a big carton of Marks and Spencer’s vanilla custard stowed away in the fridge. I find nobody notices a little cheat, so long as it’s just here and there. The trick is not to overdo it.”
― K.L. Slater, Liar

“Sit down, Mum,’ Ben says kindly when he’s finished mopping up the cream. I look down and see that the large area of polished wood is now dull and smeared, and although he’s done his best, the cream has surreptitiously seeped in between the boards where it might never be reached. ‘Mum?”
― K.L. Slater, Liar

“pick Maddy and Josh up from Mum’s house no later than six each day, and we’re always home around ten minutes later. I thought that was enough to qualify me as a good mother, a parent who is there for her children. Yet I feel a niggle deep down that tells me he’s right. Once I get through the door each evening, I simply set my laptop up on the kitchen counter and carry on working. I often cook the children’s tea around updating the InsideOut4Kids website. The reality is, I’m there… but I’m not really there. Not all of me. For the first time, I consider the echoes of my own childhood, when Mum spent so much time in her bedroom. I can’t remember the last time we all sat down and ate together, or watched TV as a family. We often stay in different rooms until it’s time for bed. And the outings to the park or the cinema we used to plan and enjoy at weekends? I seriously can’t remember the last time we did that. I thought I was being Superwoman, and it turns out I’m struggling to tick all the boxes like any other mere mortal. The realisation renders me speechless, and it doesn’t take Tom long to”
― K.L. Slater, The Silent Ones

“All the dark stuff nobody’s saying is stacking up in the silences between our words. It lives and breathes in the space around us where we can’t touch it, see it, or escape it.”
― K.L. Slater, Finding Grace

“If hope is like the softest snow, then the dread that replaces it is the razor-sharp ice that will slash and pare your very soul to ribbons”
― K.L. Slater, Blink

“This was a wretched place that most people would never get to see. Lucky them. Hope didn't feel that strong here, but fear loomed large”
― K.L. Slater, The Evidence

“It all sounds so petty said out loud yet when you’re on the receiving end, it’s very real and hurtful.”
― K.L. Slater, Little Whispers

“So, have we decided what we’d like to order?’ The waiter reappears, a little more confident now, his pencil poised expectantly above a small white order pad that looks brand new. Isaac’s pet hate: condescending waiter-speak. ‘Yes, we have decided. You can now take our order,’ Isaac says snappily, and the waiter blanches slightly.”
― K.L. Slater, Little Whispers

“The job and the flat had been sorted for a while, and finally the story of her past was in place. She had rehearsed it all in her head until it had felt real. The waiting had been hellish but she knew it was essential that any loose ends were eradicated.”
― K.L. Slater, Liar

“There’s a point at which you may might realise the journey isn’t really for you any more. But every time you get a chance to change paths, you just stay put because it’s easier. You end up trudging along the same old way and watching as life happens to other people as you pass by. Then one day you just stop looking around you”
― K.L. Slater, Liar

“The full horror of what he did here is still too much for the village psyche to handle.”
― K.L. Slater, The Mistake

“I am trapped in a vacuum that exists between life and death.”
― K.L. Slater, Blink

“My granddaughter’s face is impossibly perfect – petal-soft skin, a rosebud mouth, the faintest smudge of dark eyelashes resting against her cheeks. She sleeps, her breath warm and steady, her tiny fingers curled into loose fists. A wave of love, so fierce it almost knocks me breathless, rises inside me. I have my daughter – I know this feeling – but this experience is different. This is my baby’s baby. Not only a part of Jess, but a part of me, too, and of all the women in our family who came before.”
― K.L. Slater, My Husband Next Door

“Truth never disappears or deserts us; it’s there forever, shining strong. It can be covered and disguised but it’s still there.”
― K.L. Slater, The Mistake

“You can never be sure quite how much time you’ve got with the people you love”
― K.L. Slater, Safe With Me

“mustn’t cough. You don’t want to wake them, set the sillies screaming and crying. Leave them to their dreams, they will learn soon enough. The flames grow larger, then fuse together. You know it’s a sign that they are silently promising to help you and yet, for a second, you actually consider changing your mind. You could stomp down the flames and shout for help. You could wake them up. Then you hear”
― K.L. Slater, Safe With Me

“well,”
― K.L. Slater, Little Whispers

“Why not speak your mind, for once? Instead of dismissing your feelings, air them. Feel the difference it makes to accept that you’re angry and upset instead of trying to pretend everything is all right.”
― K.L. Slater, The Silent Ones

“some people crave familiarity, but it’s not for me. I don’t feel as if I belong around here anymore.”
― K.L. Slater, The Narrator

“His reactions were at the centre of my world and I was completely absorbed in just getting through the day on that basis”
― K.L. Slater, The Evidence

“There is no such thing as a memory-keeper, no entity exists that has the power to declare whether things really happened or not. All we have are the pictures and the short films we play over and over in our mind's eye.”
― K.L. Slater, Safe With Me

“titivating herself before work had made a change from her usual rushing out”
― K.L. Slater, Liar

“up to her bedroom and lay her in her cot. I sit in the comfy chair next to it and hold her hand through the”
― K.L. Slater, The Girl She Wanted

“Rich”
― K.L. Slater, The Married Man

“Inside, I felt hollow. Years together, wiped out in what felt like an instant.”
― K.L. Slater, The Evidence