Katie Hall-May > Quotes

“If I had made another choice that night, would
my life have been less pursued by ghosts? Or just
significantly shorter?”
― Katie Hall-May, Puck's Legacy

“I loved those people. I love them now. And I fear
them.
And I am so very sorry for all that I did to them.”
― Katie Hall-May, Puck's Legacy

“Secrets breed other secrets. That’s how they work.”
― Katie Hall-May, Puck's Legacy

“This was no fantasy. This
was death. We could call it, we could cast lots about it,
plan for it, gamble with it, welcome it in. But we did not
have the power to send it away.”
― Katie Hall-May, Puck's Legacy

“That is what Frederick is like. He’s part man, part
fantasy. He gathers your wild imaginings about him,
wraps them around himself like a garment. Until
eventually he is a figure made mostly of the mystery you
endowed him with yourself.
And you don’t try to unravel it. Because you’re afraid
that all you’d have left is a pair of brown eyes and a
limp. And by that point, you’ve already given him so
much.”
― Katie Hall-May, Puck's Legacy

“All my life I had longed for a straightforward fight. To
stride out with confidence, and slay a dragon. But there
were no dragons, and the only thing I had ever met
which barely approached one, I had loved.”
― Katie Hall-May, Puck's Legacy

“No matter how many times I made plans, or how
violently I tried to shake myself out of this stupor, I could
never destroy the conviction that whatever I escaped to
would prove only to be another, greyer prison.”
― Katie Hall-May, Puck's Legacy

“It’s all just coloured water. Of course it is. Don’t you
want to taste something real?”
― Katie Hall-May, Puck's Legacy

“The problem with life is there is just too much of it. You identify one thing and it leads to another. Nothing is simply one thing only...it's like trying to read thruogh a foreign thesaurus. You look up one word and you find another twenty. If you look up even one of those twenty, you are already forty meanings away from the first one. And there's a good chance once of those brings you back to the start.”
― Katie Hall-May, Memories of a Lost Thesaurus

“Don’t worry. It’s only a
story. A clever succession of words and mirrors.
There’s no reason at all to believe it is real.
But you want to.”
― Katie Hall-May, Puck's Legacy

“There is a strange, slow moment. The final page in my inconclusive and fraying thesaurus. And I am floating upwards, I am driftwood between them. The bright, bright blue that is the sky. And the glitter in the tarmac, like a promise of stars.”
― Katie Hall-May, Memories of a Lost Thesaurus

“Why is it that school is still always so much like school?
humour, school,”
― Katie Hall-May, Memories of a Lost Thesaurus

“I would give anything to hear him say my name one
more time. And anything not to.”
― Katie Hall-May, Puck's Legacy

“It is a private battlefield, the school arena, perhaps created by adults, but a war, nonetheless, that they cannot easily fight in. I informed the headmaster that if he could prove that a teacher could have thumped Georgie Smales as effectively, then I would be willing, next time, to call a teacher. I would, I told him, very much like to see that.”
― Katie Hall-May, Memories of a Lost Thesaurus

“Had I joined the company that very first night,
fooling myself that I was seeking some purpose, but in
reality only following Frederick? How different was I
really, from those Office Worker Mohitos, those Rat
Race Daquiris, seeking only to partner off and settle
down?”
― Katie Hall-May, Puck's Legacy

“I am afraid even now, that they are looking for me.
And I am afraid that they are not. That I am no longer
important enough for them to care. Just another
automaton, living the life I had been so afraid of, when I
drank it in cocktails all those years ago.”
― Katie Hall-May, Puck's Legacy

“My personal theory is that one of you, me, is always faulty, like a toy purchased without the batteries. It is not until you have had time to go out and buy batteries, to put them in, to turn it on, that you realise it doesn't work the way that you wanted. Doesn't match what you hoped for. It never did.

I am a bright, broken thing that he lost the receipt for.”
― Katie Hall-May, Memories of a Lost Thesaurus

“Extremism, by its very nature, must
always go to its extreme.”
― Katie Hall-May, Puck's Legacy