Tammy Cohen > Quotes

“Just how many ways it's possible to fuck up a child so badly that ten, twenty, forty years later they're still trying to make sense of it.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Imagine we could see the damage inside ourselves. Imagine it showed through us like contraband on an airport scanner. What would it be like, to walk around the city with it all on view – all the hurts and the betrayals and the things that diminished us; all the crushed dreams and the broken hearts? What would it be like to see the people our lives have made us? The people we are, under our skin. I”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“We'd met at university, where he was studying medicine and I was studying social awkwardness and a catastrophic inability to cope with deadlines.”
― Tammy Cohen, Dying For Christmas

“Once she’d thought him the most handsome man in the world, and the knowledge that most women wouldn’t look at him twice only made him more special, as if he was a brilliant artist whose work only she appreciated.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Kristen was a plump girl with a wide, doughy face, who always blinked before talking to you as if trying to expel an unwelcome image that had come unbidden into her head.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“It's like those kids who grow up in houses where the parents speak different languages and turn out bilingual. If they're exposed to something at an early enough age, they absorb it naturally and becomes just something normal.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Having someone ask you how you were, who you were, as if they genuinely wanted to know. That meant something to people.”
― Tammy Cohen, The Wedding Party

“If Ewan was a drink... he'd be whisky because he seems like a good idea when you're drunk but he makes you feel like shit in the morning. Haha!”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Charlie had come to believe himself an outsider to love. Not that he was incapable of it, or immune to it. Not at all. He was an incurable romantic, as many inveterate cynics often are. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe love was possible because he absolutely did, but rather that he didn’t believe it was possible for him. So he was doomed to live in a permanent state of quiet unfulfilment. And then he met Stefan.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“The corridor of the Psychiatry Department of La Luz City University Medical Facility was a sterile affair. Since then it’s been painted in a mellow magnolia and there’s some framed artwork on the walls. We had a memo before the prints went up, checking whether we considered them suitably ‘non-stimulating’. We all joked about that for a long time afterwards. ‘Nice jacket,’ we’d say, ‘but are you sure it’s non-stimulating enough?”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Sarah couldn’t remember when she’d last seen Charlie this happy. It was as if someone had yanked the dial of the dimmer switch round, lighting him up from inside. Normal Charlie was an endearing if reserved mix of cynicism and kindness, warmth and resignation. Now he shone with an emotional energy so exposing you almost wanted to look away, as if you were seeing something you shouldn’t.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Lost in her litany of thoughts, Emma was only vaguely aware of the alarm sounding.

‘Can you turn that fucking thing off?’ said Guy’s back. He emphasized the ‘fucking’, like a child self-consciously trying out swearing for the first time. Funny how his back seemed to have taken on a personality all of its own now Emma saw it so often. It was intractable, solid, unyielding – she imagined it to be like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, all brooding muscle and tense resistance. Unlike Guy himself whose presence settled around the house like fine mist, everywhere and nowhere at the same time.”
― Tammy Cohen, First One Missing

“When you’re a parent it’s like you wear your heart on the outside of your body.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Life isn’t theatre, much though you might like it to be. It doesn’t follow a script. It’s messy”
― Tammy Cohen, The Wedding Party

“Back then, I was looking for the big love story, the charismatic stranger. I didn’t learn until it was way too late, until long after my failed marriage to Johnny, that love doesn’t ride into town and sweep you off your feet, but sometimes looks at you in a certain way and you realize it was there all the time, right under your nose.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“The truth was, most people craved connection.”
― Tammy Cohen, The Wedding Party

“In her early twenties, she’d had so many dreams of how her life would go, and all of them had seemed possible. When you’re just starting out, potential paths radiate from you like the rays of a sun and all seem yours for the taking. But the minute you make your first choice – of career, or mate – you start shutting off all the others.”
― Tammy Cohen, The Wedding Party

“There was something about this girl’s body language, the way she kept darting a look at Leanne, then turning her eyes quickly away, that made her think maybe she was telling the truth. In Leanne’s experience, if people were lying, they tended either to look away the whole time or to fix you with intense eye contact as if daring you to disbelieve them.”
― Tammy Cohen, First One Missing

“It was something she’d told him off about on more than one occasion, this tendency to offer up his private sadnesses as a form of mass entertainment.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Double-clicking on his inbox, Jason noted that one of the three messages was from Suzy, aka ButterfliesInMyTummy, and his mood lifted. It was the fourth or fifth message they’d exchanged, and they were just starting to move beyond the tedious small-talk stage. He skimmed through the message, growing increasingly impatient. Suzy favoured those little face icons. The whole page was littered with them – smiley faces, sad faces, surprised faces, embarrassed faces. Why couldn’t she just use words like everyone else? She also put five or six exclamation marks after a sentence, or added extra vowels to words, so everything was sooooooooo much fun or soooooooooo boring. It wound Jason up when people couldn’t write properly. He wasn’t asking for brain of Britain, but he liked a woman to be able to write a sentence that started with a capital letter and ended with a full stop and at least made an attempt at the Queen’s English. At least it wasn’t in text speak. He refused to answer the messages that spelled thanks ‘tnx’. Britain didn’t go through two World Wars so that the English language could be mutilated beyond recognition.”
― Tammy Cohen, First One Missing

“of it was a plastic bottle”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Fling. That’s how he saw their night together. She’d been thinking of box-sets with a blanket over their laps and mini-breaks to Rome or Berlin and making love in front of an open fire or on a deserted beach with the sun reflecting gold in those amber flecks in his eyes . . . and he’d been thinking ‘fling’.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“there’s something broken about women – and let’s face it, they usually are women – who live their whole lives on social media, don’t you?”
― Tammy Cohen, The Wedding Party

“Suddenly Guy appeared in the doorway. Emma was surprised to see he had his jacket on, a black leather biker-style one he wore with the self-consciousness of a girl in her first pre-teen bra.”
― Tammy Cohen, First One Missing

“My house has one integral living space and I am sitting on the couch facing the TV, while she is perched on a stool at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, my laptop open in front of her. We have adopted these same positions so many times over the years, it’s like we have worn a groove in time. I imagine us suspended here for ever, like tiny figures in a doll’s house.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad