Libby Page > Quotes

“When Kate was younger, stories were her friends when she found people challenging. She searched them out, hiding among them in the library and tucking herself into their pages. She folded herself into the shape of Hermione Granger or George from The Famous Five or Catherine Moreland from Northanger Abbey and tried to be them for a day. When she started secondary school her friends were the characters she met in the pages of her books. They sat with her in the library as she snuck mouthfuls of sandwich behind books so the librarian wouldn't see. (The librarian always saw, but pretended not to.)”
― Libby Page, The Lido

“Sometimes hope can be the most painful thing.”
― Libby Page, The Lido

“Maybe I was incredibly naive, but I wanted all of him, always. That was the only way I knew how to love him.”
― Libby Page, The Lido

“When you're my age you'll understand,' she says. 'You begin to miss yourself.”
― Libby Page, The Lido

“Love is love like a tree is a tree. It can be a sapling or a hundred years old oak, but it still has a rout, lifetime and is left on mercy and disfavor of the seasons”
― Libby Page, The Lido

“She took the loneliness out of being alone.”
― Libby Page, The Lido

“but I never really felt comfortable leaving Molly alone with them even if I couldn’t have told you in words exactly why – it was more a lingering sense of unease, a feeling of wanting to hold my daughter tightly to me whenever we were around them. But despite”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“She nods and I realise how refreshing it is to speak to this woman who grew up with my husband. She may not have seen him in years but she knows him in a way that perhaps no one else does. That’s just the way with siblings. They are with you throughout those pivotal moments that shape you into the person you will eventually become. I don’t think that thread can ever really be broken, not completely.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“That my parents were not incapable of love, I was just unlovable.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“She was close to tears and I felt that old guilt and sadness rip through me – that I haven’t been able to give my daughter more. So many times, I’ve pictured a different kind of life for her. A life full of people: grandparents, cousins, siblings maybe, a father.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“It was rare that she got dressed up and went out, but each time a dinner party or the Christmas dinner with the other library staff came round she would stand in front of the mirror asking George to tell her if the dress was too short or too long, whether her makeup was okay, and if her hair looked fussy or too plain. He always smiled and told her she looked beautiful but she didn't believe him. She would believe him now - she was beautiful. She hopes Kate realizes it before she is eighty-seven.”
― Libby Page, The Lido

“It’s a city I’ve lived in for years, but a place where I’ve never made a network of friends or found a sense of really belonging. I can see now that it’s my own fault – I built walls around myself in an attempt to protect myself and my daughter. Maybe those walls kept some pain out but they also shut out joy. This is the place and the life I chose, but this summer has shown me how small my life here has been. How small my entire life has become.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“Maybe it's only about one thing, but even that is something. At that moment the darkness, although still lurking from background, withdraws.”
― Libby Page, The Lido

“Never be sorry,’ she says, a storm in her eyes. ‘Never be sorry for feeling. Never be sorry for falling in love.”
― Libby Page, The Lido

“In a large townhouse, a family is spread out across its rooms, each living in their own state but under one flag”
― Libby Page, The Lido

“...Mona feels isolated, the weight of her worries, thoughts, and anxieties hers and hers alone to carry. She thinks suddenly that this is probably why we need friends -- because however self-reliant and composed we may seem, none of us are quite strong enough to get through life shouldering these weights on our own.”
― Libby Page, The 24-Hour Café

“understand,’ she says through her tears. ‘After everything you went through, of course you wanted to leave. But I just don’t understand why you didn’t keep in touch. We were best friends. For ages I wondered what I’d done wrong. I thought I didn’t matter to you.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“My father had probably got himself into no fit state to leave the house and my mother would never have come on her own. I remember how disappointed I felt that they hadn’t been there, if not for me then for my brother, who was still small for his age and who shook when he collected his own prize from Mrs Brown, for science.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“Mallachy has given me so many unexpected wonderful moments over the past few weeks, moments when I’ve forgotten everything else and just let myself sink into happiness. But perhaps most of all, he gave me this.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“But he only had eleven chest-hairs’ worth of life inside him, and he knew that wasn’t enough to help her.”
― Libby Page, The Lido

“She can't see the deep end but knows that if she keeps kicking she will eventually reach it.”
― Libby Page, The Lido

“I want to tell her that those moments cycling with her were some of the happiest of my childhood, that I think about them all the time. But despite her smile, I think perhaps we’re not there yet.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“Fine,’ he says. ‘I cared for them for years, I looked after them when they were dying. But fine, come and help at the house. I’ll be going over there in a couple of days.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“How dare you!’ my father shouted. ‘Lying to us, running around the island like a spoilt brat, giving our neighbours every reason to think what they already do – that you’re out of control.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“Tickets for the Brixton Academy tonight,’ yells a ticket tout at the station entrance. ‘Buying and selling, tickets for the”
― Libby Page, The Lido

“Tilly always thought of bookshops as a gathering place: all these books lined up neatly on the shelves like potential friends she just hasn't met yet.”
― Libby Page, This Book Made Me Think of You

“Since marrying Jack, I have never once spent Christmas away from the island. Whenever I argued for us to take up offers from my sisters to stay with them he always feigned needing to stay and keep up the farm, but I knew that really, he didn’t want to deal with the consequences of going against his parents.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“And for a while after leaving the island I would still have described myself as an artist, even when I was working in a bar and hadn’t touched a paintbrush in a long time.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“just enough money to buy our flat from the council, although each month I still feel the same panic that I might not be able to meet my mortgage payment. I always do manage it but the fear is still there, as familiar by now as the sound of my own breath. I’ve always been anxious about money. Because if something happens – if I get sick or the boiler breaks or I suddenly need something important for Ella, there’s no one to bail us out.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“...around puberty when the girls' bodies felt to them like uncomfortable clothes they'd love to wriggle out of. She remembers the transformation: the giggling rabble became a subdued group by the water's edge, arms wrapped around themselves to cover the shame of their perfect, hideous bodies.”
― Libby Page, The Lido