Jo Harkin > Quotes

“She has been hard to love. She has been hardened against love. She has found love hard.”
― Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending

“The problem with thinking about forgetting things is that it always makes you think about the things you want to forget.”
― Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending

“If someone’s ninety percent awful and ten percent great, everyone says that deep down they’re great. Like they’re an iceberg, but all that greatness is under the water - and invisible. But actually, the truth is, they’re just ninety percent awful.”
― Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending

“We think our memories are pure and uncorrupted, but this is a delusion. Every time we access a memory we rebuild it. Every time it’s rebuilt, things are added and things are lost. In fact, the more we remember something, the less resemblance that memory bears to the original event. We know that memory is fallible—or we know it, but we don’t really believe it. If someone says we remembered something wrong, we argue over it! We fight for the honor of our memories. Maybe it’s like religion, or love. The more flimsy something is, the more fiercely we believe in it.”
― Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending

“The future is here, thinks Noor, and it wasn’t thought through.”
― Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending

“if even if it was just the bad note, if I needed that note to, well, be me.”
― Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending

“Or if even if it was just the bad note, if I needed that note to, well, be me.”
― Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending

“Edward is astonied. How can a reader judge history? It’s like a reader judging God. History is what happened. Nothing can change it. But some dead historians have lied, or guessed, and now nobody knows what’s true. The fragility of the past horrifies him. He doesn’t say “fuck” here, not anymore. But sometimes he thinks it, privily. What. The. Fuck.”
― Jo Harkin, The Pretender: A Novel

“... Lady FitzAlan lends him Margery Kempe's autobiography, which she says is the holiest book she's read save the Bible. He finds the book -- a bid for canonisation so obvious it should have been titled "If Saint Bridget Did It, So Shall I" -- amusing, but doesn't say so.”
― Jo Harkin, The Pretender

“Where does the human regret live? Police stations, hospitals. Courtrooms. Hotel bedrooms- bedrooms in general. They should advertise on pillowcases.”
― Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending

“Nobody really remembers events accurately. Even in a wider sense: we tell a story of ourselves, and edit our memories so they fit that narrative. If the story we decide to tell changes, the memories change. We see memories as creating the self, but the self that's created looks back and changes the memory.”
― Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending

“Unfair power used against other men; presumption supported by chance; a glittering gold burden.”
― Jo Harkin, The Pretender: A Novel

“the town seems expanded to brasting point:”
― Jo Harkin, The Pretender: A Novel

“Just because you can’t remember the ingredients, it doesn’t mean you’re not a cake.”
― Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending

“Wait. How did they know rats were depressed? asked Mei. There’s a simple test, her mum said. The float test. They put the rats in water. A happy rat will swim, to survive. A depressed rat just… floats.”
― Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending

“Henry repeals Richard’s act that declared Elizabeth of York and her siblings illegitimate, and orders every last copy of it destroyed. Struck from history, “forever out of remembrance.”
― Jo Harkin, The Pretender: A Novel

“Before, Mei’d been so horrified at being like her birth mother—weak, addicted, unstable—that she didn’t even consider that maybe her birth mother didn’t start like that, either, that she’d just taken that shape to fit into the space that was available. Mei—and at times she feels guilty about this, and about not wanting to track her mother down—has more space. Mei’s not so worried, either, that she’s going to repeat the same story.”
― Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending

“Infinite Jest)”
― Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending

“Grief, from what he’s seen, is seasonal. First everything is frozen into solid blocks. Then it thaws, and the ice rains down, water crashing everywhere. Then, later, the leaf buds start to appear.”
― Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending

“I once wanted to be a king who wrote history. Now I realise only kings write history,' Simnel says. 'Is anything true written anymore?”
― Jo Harkin, The Pretender