Sarah Eyre > Quotes

“Once, after I’d left him, I stayed in bed for three days with a stack of novels and several packets of custard creams and I bled without restraint. I wanted to see how much of a gorgeous, spicy mess one womb-governed body could make. I wanted to turn the bed sheet into a Rorschach test, a map, a missive, a squeeze, a jubilant shout. I made scabs and poppies. I bred silky scarlet gloop and jammy crusts, liver spots, dropped plums. Then I let it dry and pinned it up on the wall. I spent a lot of time looking at it, deciphering the shapes. There were horses, waves, church spires, tulips, crocuses, lotus flowers, fiery dragoons. It was really quite beautiful and energising to see it hung like a painting, exuding the vague scents of malt, seaweed and yeast. It made me feel quite empowered. All that blood. All my thick, rich healthy blood. All those clever stains I’d created.”
― Sarah Eyre, The New Abject: Tales of Modern Unease

“In the tube, Hazel was unaware that the day which had promised so well had clouded over, and when she got to her destination, distracted by the small piece of work she had been able to do on her journey, she did not even remember that the morning had started fine.”
― Sarah Eyre, The New Abject: Tales of Modern Unease

“It seemed to her that she spent most of her life wrestling with the gap between how things seemed and how things were, trying to get the two sides to meet.”
― Sarah Eyre, The New Abject: Tales of Modern Unease

“As long as she, Eve, wasn’t throwing the baby into life with a disastrous name, like launching a ship one degree off course and having to watch it dash on rocks.”
― Sarah Eyre, The New Abject: Tales of Modern Unease

“From the front of her small Victorian terrace, she could have looked down the hill and watched the moon drop into its darkness. It is hard for her not to think of the reservoir and its cadaverous stillness and worry.”
― Sarah Eyre, The New Abject: Tales of Modern Unease

“History shows we’re all too capable, as a species, of completely ignoring atrocity when it happens, of closing ourselves off and pretending it’s not there. The better reaction, surely, is to face it, to let it get to us. To scream.”
― Sarah Eyre, The New Abject: Tales of Modern Unease