Susie Steiner > Quotes

“One minute you are loved, and then you are not.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“She's always rehearsing, having imaginary conversations in her head that preempt real encounters”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“​Life... is full of compromises you never thought you'd make when you were young.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“All these people locked in their own thoughts, enmeshed in complicated lives, each of us believing we’re at the center.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Her eyes red-rimmed, now brimming, her forehead furrowed with disbelief and anger. There is nothing worse than seeing your mother cry and being the cause.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Her [journalist] father always told his trainees: If one side says it's raining and the other says it's dry, it's not your job to quote both. It's your job to look out of the window and find out the truth.”
― Susie Steiner, Remain Silent

“Manon knows what lies beneath, how people can seem normal and yet grief swirls about like an unseen tide working against the currents of life, the mourner wrong-footed by its undertow. The bereaved should wear signs, she thinks, saying GRIEF IN PROGRESS—for at least a couple of years.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Tea had featured heavily in the past fortnight. Miriam sometimes felt her belly sloshing with it, like a waterbed, yet still she took tea when it was proffered, for the symbolism, she supposed - solicitude, comfort, warmth. It is the English way, after all.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“The problem of food, for one: it symbolizes everything. She wants delicious morsels, yet cooking for herself is so defeating: a surplus of ingredients, the washing-up unshared, and the sense that it doesn’t matter—the production of it or whether it’s nice.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“He misses her. He miser her, he misses her, he misses her. ...Seven miserable lonely days of missing someone he never should have been with in the first place, yet wanting her back even so. He wonders if he could overlook her lack of human sympathy and generalized air of bitterness, just so he could have the feeling of being together again.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“​...she wonders if it isn't genetic - the whole personal tidiness thing. One is destined to become one's mother, after all. This thought makes her smile to herself - there are worse things.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Davy, of course, smiling in at her, coffee in hand, the light glowing behind those marvellous ears, like red quotation marks.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“She loves a silence with Davy Walker. Some people give good silence, and he is one of them.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“this is a Join in the Fun party. It is not a Gross Sense of Entitlement party.”
― Susie Steiner, Remain Silent

“After a time it dawned on her that the world was full of catastrophically exhausted people on the borders of normal function—offices laden with zombie-parents who hadn’t slept in years, never mind weeks; cars being driven by ravaged adults with barely enough energy to find their shoes.”
― Susie Steiner, Persons Unknown

“The baby’s tiny fat hand lies on Manon’s other breast, possessively. Recently, he’s begun pulling off—rather painfully taking the nipple with him in his powerful suction-gums—in order to look up at her and smile. Huge gummy mouth, froglike, eyes filled with delight. It’s as if he is saying thank you for the milk, or something along the lines of “Isn’t this nice, we two?”
― Susie Steiner, Persons Unknown

“Loneliness is as big a health hazard as smoking fifteen fags a day, and not nearly as enjoyable.”
― Susie Steiner, Persons Unknown

“Nature doesn't know what to do with a childless woman of thirty-nine, except throw her that fertility curveball--aches and pains combined with extra time, like some terrifying end to a high-stakes football match.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“She's alone so much these days, in part because when the sand drifts receded, along with the departure of the children, they left an excess of time, while Ian's existence maintained its steady course, which was essentially Rushing About Being Important.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“When they'd spotted Rollo down the corridor at the police station in Huntingdon, both she and Ian felt the weak gratitude of the elderly.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“No one has told her that becoming someone’s mother would lead her to imagine the catastrophic end to her motherhood.”
― Susie Steiner, Persons Unknown

“Yes, she's grumpy, but a skinny latte soon takes the edge off her, most days, anyhow--like throwing a steak into the lion enclosure.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Mourning someone is hard work. It’s so hard it brings with it a tiredness you can’t even believe. You keep thinking you can sleep it off but you just get more tired as it goes on.”
― Susie Steiner, Persons Unknown

“She has learned that awkwardness no more belongs to her than does the weather. She can observe it, like an interested bystander, rather than frantically trying to make it shift.”
― Susie Steiner, Remain Silent

“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“I sometimes think I don't actually like anyone that much. That all I ever want is to be on my own. And then I can't cope with it--with myself, just myself all the time, and it's like I become the worst company of all--and there's this awful realization that I need people, and it's almost humiliating.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“It was everyone’s fault because it was no one’s.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“guys who come over are Baltic Russians. Just thought it might help.”
― Susie Steiner, Remain Silent

“No, this is easy-does-it shabby. I-know-who-I-am shabby. Persian-rug shabby.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Angel and I were watching all this, the smears of ketchup hardening on our discarded plates, our feet up as if our legs were paralyzed, which they were I suppose. There is little in modern life more paralyzing than the recliner chair.”
― Susie Steiner, Persons Unknown