Sarah Hilary > Quotes

“Wiring in nooses from the ceiling, waiting to be connected, plugged into the rest of the city.”
― Sarah Hilary, Tastes Like Fear

“Violence,’ someone had once told Marnie, ‘isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t someone bursting into your home in the middle of the night. It’s a soft knock on the door in daylight. A knock that tells you the person outside has brought the worst possible news. News that’s going to change your life forever. Violence is waiting for a knock on the door, and realising your whole life is that knock.’

Violence isn’t what you think it is. And punishment isn’t prison. It’s waiting for that soft knock on the door. It’s never being free.”
― Sarah Hilary, Quieter Than Killing

“The house was bay-windowed, clinging to its original features the way a pensioner clung to her handbag on pension day. The neighbours had put up a pierced cement wall,”
― Sarah Hilary, Tastes Like Fear

“The truth is that we all live by leaving behind. Borges. That was it. Jorge Luis Borges’s Funes the Memorious, a book about a man who couldn’t forget anything, who was driven mad by his memory. Reading Borges had been light relief during her Camus phase, but that line had stuck with her. We all live by leaving behind.”
― Sarah Hilary, No Other Darkness

“Marnie thought of the fierceness of mothers, all the ways in which they battle for their children, all the ways in which it can go wrong.”
― Sarah Hilary, Come and Find Me

“A knock that tells you the person outside has brought the worst possible news. News that’s going to change your life forever. Violence is waiting for a knock on the door, and realising your whole life is that knock.”
― Sarah Hilary, Quieter Than Killing

“Cameras make ghosts out of people.’ Bob Dylan, of all people,”
― Sarah Hilary, Come and Find Me

“We all live by leaving behind.”
― Sarah Hilary, No Other Darkness

“It became its own discipline, the fear of failing to do as they said; a voice in her head berating her before anyone else could.”
― Sarah Hilary, Someone Else's Skin

“made her realise, again, how lucky she’d been to grow up in a secure, loving home.”
― Sarah Hilary, No Other Darkness

“Mum oh-Teddying as if she hadn’t grown up in the countryside, didn’t know its savageries, so casual and constant.”
― Sarah Hilary, Come and Find Me

“An idea was knocking about in the back of her head, like a moth at a dimly lit window.”
― Sarah Hilary, Someone Else's Skin

“Violence,’ someone had once told Marnie, ‘isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t someone bursting into your home in the middle of the night. It’s a soft knock on the door in daylight.”
― Sarah Hilary, Quieter Than Killing

“He was nineteen, serving time for a double murder committed five years ago, when he was fourteen.”
― Sarah Hilary, Someone Else's Skin

“You always always put family first, no matter how rotten. A bad family’s better than an empty sty. You don’t cut off a stinking finger.”
― Sarah Hilary, Quieter Than Killing

“The spine stores the memory of pain. She’d read that somewhere. They’d found the protein responsible for managing the body’s response to central neuropathic pain syndrome. Whatever that meant.”
― Sarah Hilary, Someone Else's Skin

“Except the cars weren’t to be played with. He had shelves and shelves of them but not to play with, only to look at.’ Loss could compel a person to collect,”
― Sarah Hilary, Come and Find Me

“His temples throbbed but the migraine had retreated, leaving a soft wash of endorphins in its wake. He lay blinking at the pillow, light-headed with relief.”
― Sarah Hilary, Tastes Like Fear

“In the Middle Ages, people believed the devil lived in the souls of unbaptised children. A baptism drove him out, but he had to be able to exit the church. So they built these little doorways which they bricked up after the devil was gone. You wouldn’t want him trapped in the church, you see. The devil’s door in the reclamation yard was very small, and riddled with worm.”
― Sarah Hilary, Come and Find Me

“For my mother, the best in the world”
― Sarah Hilary, No Other Darkness

“Her heart staggered and stuttered in her chest, like a rat caught in the cage of her ribs.”
― Sarah Hilary, Someone Else's Skin

“No drugs, no alcohol. The only thing throwing a spike is sodium. She wasn’t far off being hypernatremic. That’s salt poisoning, or dehydration. Not”
― Sarah Hilary, Tastes Like Fear

“Many will have suffered depression as teenagers or young women, so they’ll be familiar with that stigma, the way treatment involves judgement. It shouldn’t, but it”
― Sarah Hilary, No Other Darkness

“He was aggressively good-looking, at least a couple of inches taller than the slouch in his spine suggested, and healthier than anyone with a nicotine habit deserved to look. Clear skin and eyes, athletic build.”
― Sarah Hilary, No Other Darkness

“We’re solitary by nature. Aren’t we? Even families … Fundamentally, I mean.”
― Sarah Hilary, No Other Darkness

“So I send my thoughts out of the cell, miles away, to my favourite landscape. We lived in the countryside-proper, Mum and me, a place where it still floods every spring. We’d go walking in the hills when the winter thawed, high up where the waters couldn’t reach us. I never told Mickey about that. He wasn’t interested in my stories, only in his.”
― Sarah Hilary, Come and Find Me

“Noah had to sleep. He had to be unconscious. It was the only cure he knew, when the pain got this bad. ‘Tramadol,’ he begged his brother. ‘Bathroom cabinet.’ Sol said, ‘I’m on it.”
― Sarah Hilary, Tastes Like Fear

“To check the fan’s working before the shit hits.”
― Sarah Hilary, No Other Darkness

“The glass served up her likeness without sympathy, showing every line and shadow.”
― Sarah Hilary, Someone Else's Skin

“Real pain and imagined pain feel the same. They trigger the same part of the brain, the social worker told me.”
― Sarah Hilary, Tastes Like Fear