Sarah Hall > Quotes

“You’ve been wondering lately when the moment is that somebody is truly lost to you.”
― Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man

“Of all the conditions we experience, solitude is perhaps the most misunderstood.”
― Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man

“He told her the flowers in her painting contained exactly the purple substance of the flowers on the desk in front of her [...] Let us open the window and see if your painting can entice the butterflies.”
― Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man

“You didn’t understand what he was saying, until he kissed you. It was a kiss of such complicity, of such uncomplicated sympathy, that you felt for the first time not alone in your suffering.”
― Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man

“You’ve found that there is something that can make you feel, and make you feel present: sex. Not the routine, dusk-and-dawn sex of a trusted, established relationship, but illicit, dangerous sex. Sex that is novel and leaves you sore; that is experienced in the gaps between your mundane, moral life; that is strange and breathless and addictive.”
― Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man

“There is always half a truth in cliche.”
― Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man

“That boy may have been born on third base but he sure as shit ain’t scored a triple.”
― Sarah Hall

“People were made up of shit and piss and phlegm and bits and pieces of experience.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“There were times when initial introductions were so vested with something other as to confuse and distract and entrance both parties, Cy would realize later. And only further into their relationships when you knew the person better, and their place in your life became clear, if there was love, if there was hate, if there was deepness of any kind, only then did you understand that the embers of meaning have been present all along and glowing since that first moment you laid eyes on them. As if you already knew them before you came to know them. As if some rift had bent time.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“This is your first and final chance, your one and only biography.”
― Sarah Hall

“One thing I will say, they often take it better than a man. Pain, that is. Probably the residue of tolerance from when they were all bloody witches and got stoned or burned or drowned for it, eh lad? Never tell your mother I said that, by the way.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“There's blindness to new lovers. They exist in the rare atmosphere of their own colony, trusting by sense and feel, creatures consuming each other, building shelters with their hopes. Other worlds cease. I know I felt something as it began, an understanding, foreboding, ordinance, even. Love is never the oldest story. It grows in the rich darkness.”
― Sarah Hall, Burntcoat

“We should not forget that when we limp away afflicted through the spirit, it is not to the factory gates or to the corporate steps we pilgrimage. Instead we go to the sea for its salt. We find shade under the sycamores on the great avenues. Or we go to the rivers where water tells us modestly of its own sickness.”
― Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man

“Those partial to drink were hiding faults and dishonesty. They were sloppy souls, even the ones with pleasant manners and fine noses.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“Blue that was unstable and misbehaved when left in skin. Blue like the sea that had taken his father. Blue, for his mother’s sake, and for the true colour of every bereaved and bloodless heart when it is collapsing.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“To be comfortable inside one’s sadness is not valueless. This too will pass. All things tend towards transience, mutability. It is in such mindful moments, when everything is both held and released, that revelation comes.”
― Sarah Hall, Madame Zero: 9 Stories

“I'm the wood in the fire. I've experienced, altered in nature. I am burnt, damaged, more resilient. A life is a bead of water on the black surface, so frail, so strong, its world incredibly held.”
― Sarah Hall, Burntcoat

“Elliot Rawley was a drinker, Cy’s mother had been right. And he was a poor drinker. One that let the demons of the bottle into his head when he tipped it back, demons that went about unloosing all the trouble they could find stashed in the catacombs of his mind. Every tragic thing that had ever happened, every self-doubt, every delusion, freed itself from bondage and revisited him when he drank.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“There are stories told to him only at this time of year. Fantastic, magical stories, the old Hollier in the woods finding only three red berries, which peel back in the night to reveal gifts of frankincense, gold and myrrh, Christmas in hot deserts, dust-blown countries, the necklace of tears, and the story of the robin.”
― Sarah Hall, Haweswater

“In truth, she disliked books. She felt a peculiar disquiet when opening the pages. She had felt it since childhood. She did not know why. Something in the act itself, the immersion, the seclusion, was disturbing. Reading was an affirmation of being alone, of being separate, trapped. Books were like oubliettes. Her preference was for company, the tactile world, atoms.”
― Sarah Hall, The Beautiful Indifference

“It is its absence which defines the importance of a thing.”
― Sarah Hall, Mrs Fox

“People went through life like well handled jugs, collecting chips and scrapes and stains from wear and tear, from holding and pouring life.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“We should not forget that when we limp away afflicted through the spirit, it is not to the factory gates or to the corporate steps we pilgrimage. Instead we go to the sea for its salt. We find shade under the sycamores on the great avenues. Or we go to the rivers where water tells us modestly of its own sickness. I cannot say that I have found peace now. But I have never loved with greater strength than in this place, with its earth the color of verdaccio and its generous fruit.”
― Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man

“I have this feeling - of being unplugged and too far from the socket and what remains is a red warning bar.”
― Sarah Hall, Burntcoat

“Personal effects: how irrelevant they are, how sad, how lost, how vagrant, without the force that gives them purpose.”
― Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man

“The two of you are different now, calmer. There is still sex, occasionally, but is no longer a priority to seduce or be seduced by him.”
― Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man

“So, tell me. Was it fear that stopped you? Fear of reprisal? Fear of what else they might do to you? Sister, how bad does a situation have to be before a woman will strike out, not in defence, but because something is, as you say, worth fighting for?”
― Sarah Hall, Daughters of the North

“The show brought Claudia sadness finer than any requiem or any gravestone or anything beautiful or sorrowful that she could think of. On afternoons when she wasn't working with her husband or rotating on the platform in the Human Picture Gallery at Luna, she would go off by herself and pay her dime and linger in the corridors of the exhibit.”
― Sarah Hall

“The man had added to his body in a way that was brave and timeless and beyond adornment.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“I said, it's strange, each time I see you again. You look different. Altered. You're not like I remember. I have to get used to you.”
― Sarah Hall