Emily Barr > Quotes

“I am really here. Yet I know I am not. I am inside something that must be buried in my head. I am layers deep in my own brain.”
― Emily Barr, The One Memory of Flora Banks

“I want to see how I can exist by myself. I want to be allowed to live inside my memory.”
― Emily Barr, The One Memory of Flora Banks

“Don't panic, because everything is probably all right, and it it's not, panicking will make it worse.”
― Emily Barr, The One Memory of Flora Banks

“The inside of my head is out of control. It is on fire. It is snowing. It is a wild jungle. It is an Arctic wilderness. It is everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will happen, all at once.”
― Emily Barr, The One Memory of Flora Banks

“Time is a random thing. It is the thing that makes us older. Humans use it to organize the world. They have invented a system to try to make order from randomness. The other humans, all of them but me, live their lives by hours and minutes and days and seconds, but those things are nothing. The universe would laugh at our attempts to organize it, if it could be bothered to notice them.
Time is the thing that makes our bodies shrivel and decay. That is why people are scared of it.”
― Emily Barr, The One Memory of Flora Banks

“Although I don't know much about anything, I know that I have a story. I know that it is not over. There are shades and shadows of adventures and people and wild new places. Whatever Paris might turn out to be, and whatever Dr. Epstein is able to do, I want to be there to find out.”
― Emily Barr, The One Memory of Flora Banks

“I have woken up inside one of my own memories. I am really here, yet I know I am not.”
― Emily Barr, The One Memory of Flora Banks

“I think you're talking shit. You think we don't all feel like that? Like we're crazy, like we're not a real person, like we don't exist? Everyone feels that way sometimes. I can remember talking to you when you lost your bag. So what? You can't remember and that's not a bad thing. It doesn't make me better than you. I'm a stranger to you, but here's what I see:
I see a girl who has suffered a terrible damage to her brain. Someone who, it seems, is shut away by her parents to keep her safe. But inside there is a vibrant person, a traveler, and her memory of this boy Drake has propelled her into action. I think, Flora, that you came here not to find Drake but to find yourself. It wasn't Drake--he's an unlikely romantic hero, really--it was you. Didn't you come here, perhaps, because you heard him talking about the place he was going to, and it called to you?"
I don't know what to say. I don't say anything.
" Our come from Oslo, and Svalbard called me, even though I'm not really the rugged adventurous type. Like you, I had to come. Some of us are meant to be here. We need this place...We need to be small specks in wild nature, by the pole. The midnight sun. The midday darkness. The northern lights. It called to you, Flora, and you answered. You overcame everything, and you came here, alone. You are the bravest person I've ever met.”
― Emily Barr, The One Memory of Flora Banks

“She has to live, but I pull her towards death.”
― Emily Barr, Ghosted

“Have you seen this cat?”
― Emily Barr, The One Memory of Flora Banks

“...I want to look after her. I cannot begin to look after her: she looks after me and that's how we work.”
― Emily Barr, The One Memory of Flora Banks

“want to scream, and sometimes I do. On occasion, I scream as loudly as I can,”
― Emily Barr, The Sleeper

“I would rather be single. I cannot possibly say that.”
― Emily Barr, The Sleeper

“Il tempo è una cosa casuale. È la cosa che ci rende vecchi. Gli uomini lo usano per organizzare il mondo. Hanno inventato un sistema per cercare di dare ordine al caso. Gli altri esseri umani, tutti tranne me, hanno la loro vita scandita dal passare delle ore, dei minuti, dei giorni, dei secondi, ma tutte queste cose non sono niente. L'universo riderebbe dei nostri tentativi di organizzarlo, se si prendesse la briga di notarli.
Il tempo è la cosa che fa avvizzire e deteriorare il nostro corpo. Ecco perché tutti ne hanno paura. Ma questo non mi riguarda: io so che non invecchierò mai.”
― Emily Barr, The One Memory of Flora Banks

“I'd lost sight of the most basic things in life and now they fill me with joy. It's like the feeling when you've been ill and then you recover and promise you'll never take your health for granted again. I will never take my happiness for granted.”
― Emily Barr, A girl can dream

“I am married to a man who calls a phone charger ‘the pluggy-in thing’, and the remote control ‘the buttony thing for the telly’.”
― Emily Barr, The Sleeper

“You would have been happy with a wife who adored you, not someone who clung on to you like a life raft on a stormy sea and then wished she could cast you aside and move on when she reached land.”
― Emily Barr, The Sleeper

“I have never really been able to separate a good instinct from a self-destructive urge),”
― Emily Barr, Stranded

“This, once almost an endearing habit, is now an affectation that drives me to the brink of homicide.”
― Emily Barr, The Sleeper

“I put a row of toys on the bed. A brown-haired Barbie doll, then a Lego ambulance...then a gray Buckbeak the Hippogriff.”
― Emily Barr, The One Memory of Flora Banks

“apron, a cheap appropriation of the Cath Kidston effect. I feel like an interloper in someone else’s life. I am a creature from science fiction, wearing an earth body to disguise my true self.”
― Emily Barr, The Sleeper

“There is nothing in the universe but this. I smile. I do not talk to people. I just breathe and stare and exist.”
― Emily Barr, The One Memory of Flora Banks

“my face: I should have had a single tear frozen to my cheek,”
― Emily Barr, The Sleeper

“It is lonely, being an evil alien in disguise.”
― Emily Barr, The Sleeper

“Last time we went to the Ferryboat, I looked around at the families of upmarket beachgoers, at their healthy children expertly peeling prawns and drinking organic lemonade, and I tried to tell myself that everyone has sadnesses, that some of the adults would be hideously miserable in their marriages, that people would be having affairs and drinking too much and addicted to gambling, that lives would be on the verge of falling apart, families breaking up, businesses going bankrupt.”
― Emily Barr, The Sleeper

“That, right now, is enough.”
― Emily Barr

“and he has never been anything worse to me than incredibly, cringingly annoying. I married the wrong man, with an inkling at the time that that was what I was doing, and so it is my fault and I am stuck.”
― Emily Barr, The Sleeper

“I was just a tiny part of a huge universe, and nothing really mattered. Every single thing was temporary, and one day all of us would be gone without trace. It was an intensely soothing thought.”
― Emily Barr, The Sleeper