Fiona Shaw > Quotes

“It was the most exciting sentence I've ever heard," Lydia said. Reaching out, she stroked the back of Jean's hand. "In front of your friends, to call me your love.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“The damp air eased between sheets tossed and loosened with dreams, kissing uncovered throats, slipping in with unguarded breaths to lie snugly in the lungs and wait for day.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell it to the Bees

“we discovered that some great minds have the same passions, and now look where we are”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“he put his check to the hive.
"Remember me," he said, and he made his voice smooth as smoke. "Don't wake up, just listen out in your dreams, bees, and you'll hear.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“Her head burned and her thoughts danced at the edge of her mind like scraps of ash in the heat of a fire.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“When I dance, it’s you I dance with. I think about you all the time. I don’t understand, but I’m so tired with keeping it in.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“Sometimes he’d get annoyed at it, want to be left alone, wished he’d gone skateboarding, but mostly not.”
― Fiona Shaw, Outwalkers

“Jake glanced up at the curtained windows. A boy slept inside one of those rooms. Could be me, he thought. Could be me with the garden and the swing, and a pad with all the games on it, and a mobile, and the Santa Cruz; and him out here, dead parents, scrounging other people’s clothes, on the run. There was the skateboard, leaned up against the porch, like it was the simplest thing in the world to own it. He took a few steps towards it. –Don’t. Poacher’s voice was a whisper.”
― Fiona Shaw, Outwalkers

“Jean knew that for every man or woman who came to see her, and put their bag down, or took off their hat, or unfastened their coat, and sat in the buttoned brown upholstered chair, there came into the consulting room with them a whole life lived, and a cluster of human intimacies. She knew that very often the sore arm, or the asthma, the bronchitis or the shingles, the infected finger or the worry over another pregnancy, carried the fray of that life. She would listen, and she would treat, and often she was sure that the first did more good than the second.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“Bloody men. Think they've a God-given right to be better off than women. Work, marriage, divorce, the lot. They do less, get paid more and act like they own the place.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“I wish they'd stop thinking that I wanted any extra man," she said, and the cat arched ever so slightly and slept on.”
― Fiona Shaw

“Outside a new dark was falling, a dark Charlie didn't know yet. He walked carefully, wheeling the bike. Like everything else here, the street lamps had bigger kingdoms and the pools of shadow between them fell wider and deeper than he was used. to.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“Lydia had never been so hungry before. She’d never felt this clamour, this need... ...and most especially when she lay down to sleep, her longing bruised her eyes and flushed her skin.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“Funny how a perfume can do that. Take you straight back somewhere, or remind you of someone so much.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“As Lydia sat down on the step, wrapping her cardigan round for warmth, it looked as if she might almost have been waiting for Jean.
Jean watched and her heart beat out the seconds like a percussive force. She was unavoidably, unaccountably in love with this woman who sat there on the cold stone, unknowing and unknown.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“But Lydia's kiss had up-ended the world and Jean didn't know how to go on.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“She conjured Lydia everywhere – her face, her neck, bent towards the stream, her shoulders, her breasts, her hands as she spoke, telling stories in the air, her laugh, her mouth – but she didn’t know how to see her.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“When I dance, it's you I dance with. I think about you all the time. I don't understand, but I'm so tired with keeping it in.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“I often find myself thinking when I’m walking,’ Jean said. ‘Sometimes I lean my worries up against the rocks as I walk. But sometimes something comes to me, about a difficult case maybe, that I hadn’t thought of in the surgery. A diagnosis. An answer.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“Is he excited?’ Jean said.
‘He said it would be like a new world to look at. He said you had told him so.’
Jean kissed the woman she would leave her life for, run away for.
‘He’s right,’ she said.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“I with they'd stop thinking that I wanted any extra man", she said, and the cat arched ever so slightly and slept on.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“- you couldn't set a scale to the sadness by knowing what gave rise to it. She didn't understand why some were stuck harder than others, but she knew that it was so.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“They kissed as if the universe began and ended there; as if nothing else existed but their two bodies, their two mouths, and the desire between them.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“Jean rolled her shirtsleeves up above her elbows and leaned back on her arms, lifted her face to the slant of sun. She shut her eyes.
I don’t know where I am, she thought. I could be anywhere in the whole world.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“They knew the colour of old jealousy, each of them at the table. Their stories were like incantations, to keep it at bay.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“The silence gathered itself around her shoulders, warm and possessive, and she put a hand to it as you might to a cat that had settled there, then climbed the stairs to her bedroom.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“From inside the thick of her grief, Lydia read. She read without lifting her eyes...only pausing when the ache in her shoulder or the pins and needles in her foot forced her to lift her eyes from the page, shift the pillows and turn the other way. Then her gaze would fall on the wallpaper with its pattern of roses and she would blink and wonder where in the world she was. Then, as she started to remember, thank God, there was the book, and she would slip under again, a sigh in her throat.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“Lydia watched as Jean reached to pick up a pebble. She watched her muscles dance beneath the cotton; she watched the strong, slender rise of her spine and she wondered if she’d ever been in love.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees

“The man went back to reading the news on the screen: ‘Three arrested for virus violation’ … ‘PM hosts Allied Security Talks’, Jake read.”
― Fiona Shaw, Outwalkers

“But Lydia's kiss had up-ended the world and Jean didn't know how to go on. Things were altered in a way she couldn't understand.”
― Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees