Susan Fletcher > Quotes

“I believe the world is as we choose to view it. Simple as that. Our happiness is, in the end, up to us, and to no one else.”
― Susan Fletcher

“We carry on. We have ourselves and we carry on- in spite of our losses and mistakes and women, I think, have more than most. We are good secret-keepers. We can tie weights to out guilt and passions, and hatred and deceitfulness, and let them sink down, so that you'd never know they existed at all. But we know. I can count all mine.”
― Susan Fletcher

“There are moments.
You will know them.”
― Susan Fletcher

“Marjan. I have told him tales of good women and bad women, strong women and weak women, shy women and bold women, clever women and stupid women, honest women and women who betray. I'm hoping that, by living inside their skins while he hears their stories, he'll understand over time that women are not all this way or that way. I'm hoping he'll look at women as he does at men--that you must judge each of us on her own merits, and not condemn us or exalt us only because we belong to a particular sex.”
― Susan Fletcher, Shadow Spinner

“Perfection is a moving target”
― Susan Fletcher

“If you let words go buzzing out of your mouth like bees, she always told me, they will come back and sting you.”
― Susan Fletcher, Shadow Spinner

“Imagine it. Use all your strength and imagine it exactly. And it will happen that way.”
― Susan Fletcher

“Stories are thick with meanings. You can fall in love with a story for what you think it says, but you can't know for certain where it will lead your listeners. If you're telling a tale to teach children to be generous, they may fix instead on the part where your hero hides in an olive jar, then spend the whole next day fighting about who gets to try it first.

People take what they need from the stories they hear. The tale is often wiser than the teller.”
― Susan Fletcher, Shadow Spinner

“There are some stories that you don't tell aloud, that you make up and tell silently to yourself.”
― Susan Fletcher, Shadow Spinner

“My auntie Chava used to tell me to chew my words before letting them out. "Seven times, Majan," she would say. "Chew them seven times.”
― Susan Fletcher, Shadow Spinner

“Mr Phipps seemed to think criminality was passed down through the generations like a stutter, or a squint, or in my case red hair.”
― Susan Fletcher

“You're the one who taught me that there is truth below the surface of tales. That we can learn courage from them. That they can teach us how to live our lives.”
― Susan Fletcher, Shadow Spinner

“We have our stories, and we speak of them, and weave them into other people's stories - that's how it goes, does it not?”
― Susan Fletcher

“Love is blind, they say. But isn’t it more that love makes us see too much? Isn’t it more that love floods our brain with sights and sounds, so that everything looks bigger, brighter, more lovely than ever before?”
― Susan Fletcher

“There are many different words inside a city. The world of the rich and the world of beggars. The world of men and the world behind the veil. The worlds of Muslims and of Christians and of Jews.
If you are a rich woman living inside a harem, the world of a poor Christian beggarman is as foreign as China or Abyssinia.
All the worlds touch at the bazaar. And the other place where they touch is in stories. Shahrazad crossed borders all the time, telling tales of country women and Bedouin sheikhs, of poor fishermen and scheming sultanas, of Jewish doctors and Christian brokers, of India and China and the lands of the jinn.
If we don’t share our stories—trading them across our borders as freely as spices and ebony and silk—we will all be strangers forever.”
― Susan Fletcher, Shadow Spinner

“I hoarded all the stories that reflected the light and dazzled me.”
― Susan Fletcher

“There is not one wide happiness that reaches us all at the same time.”
― Susan Fletcher

“And in my head I laid out the stories the islanders told me... the flakes of silver, the seals who are wiser than humans, the girl who floated like a patchwork star.”
― Susan Fletcher

“Florrie studies him. From her lower viewpoint, she sees his pores and wrinkles, and a thumbprint on one of his lenses. There is, too, a nick of a razor near his bottom lip- and it reminds her once more that this elderly gent is still a boy, in some ways, as she is still a girl, fashioning a trumpet out of a rolled-up newspaper or chasing Bobs down the garden. She’s still blowing out ten birthday candles. We don’t leave the children we were. We simply grow around them like a tree will, in the end, grow around a bicycle that’s been left against them.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Night in Question

“The Sultan tapped his tented fingers, staring into the distance. Suddenly, he lunged toward me, took hold of my wrist, and pulled me roughly down to sit on the cushion beside him. “This . . . mermaid,” he said through clenched teeth, leaning in so close to me that I could smell the mint on his breath. “The one who sang to the king at night.” His voice was fierce, but quiet. I couldn’t tell if anyone but me could hear. “How . . .” he began. “How did she think of the king . . . in her heart?”
I glanced quickly up at his face and saw there a look that took me by surprise. An oddly soft, vulnerable, hurting look. The look of a man who might cry out in his sleep at night, like a child. But then the stony mask slid back.
“Did she despise him,” the Sultan asked, “for making her sing for her life each night? Did she only pretend affection to save her own skin? Did she . . . loathe him for what he had done before, to his other wives? For his . . . sins?”
“No, my lord,” I said softly. “She loved him.”
“Do you swear it?” He gripped my wrist harder, until it hurt.
“Yes, my lord. She told me—” I stopped, corrected myself. “She told the mermaid with the broken fin. She said the king—the merman king, my lord—she said that he had a deep hurting inside him. She said that she wanted to soothe him. And when the mermaid with the broken fin . . . questioned how the queen could love him—because of the things you just said, my lord—the queen said, ‘I’m not ashamed of loving him. There’s nothing wrong with loving someone. It’s hating—that’s what’s wrong.”
― Susan Fletcher, Shadow Spinner

“We think, for so long, that old age will never find us. We feel that we, as individuals, might somehow be exempt from it, that we might be given some sort of ticket that allows us to sidestep death, as one might a manhole cover, and carry on, whistling a tune. And then, one day, we find that our knees crack as we descend a staircase or someone offers us a seat on a tube train or we catch sight of ourselves in a shop window and think, Good God, that can't be me- so that we realize that no, we aren't exempt.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Night in Question

“Those moments that we remember. The tiniest moments or parts of a moment - a tap of a nail against a mug or the sound of a man swallowing, or how the sweeping beam finds the kitchen walls and then leaves them. We count the seconds, he and I.”
― Susan Fletcher

“Love is too small a word - too small.”
― Susan Fletcher

“So I was for stories. I was for stries just as gannets were for balls of silver-flashing fish - I'd crash towards them, gaping. I'd try for as many as I could. And I'd keep them safe like feathers in a vase... They have been my comfort. My family. My strange nourishment.”
― Susan Fletcher

“I want him to see me as I saw him then. I want him to find me alone at the end of the day with the sun in my hair. I want his heart to buckle, too.”
― Susan Fletcher

“I think sometimes she unfolds her losses and stares at them, in the dark”
― Susan Fletcher, Corrag

“Tell me about Stackpole then...
Like I am now, but smaller.”
― Susan Fletcher

“Feathers... drift on the water like dreams.”
― Susan Fletcher

“.. they discussed what they wanted from this life- this brief, single dance in the sunlight of life. "Adventures," she told him... "I've always wanted them." from the moment that Bobs drew the world with his finger on the kitchen tabletop, this had been truth.
"Not to be married with children? Don't most women want that?"
"Not me," she replied. "Not these days.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Night in Question

“Of course I remember. I remember my aching back and the drizzle, and the throb of my piercing in the top of my ear. I'd left university because of him. I'd learnt that I didn't want to be anywhere he wasn't, that I physically couldn't stand it. I was eighteen; he was in his early thirties. I came up the lane and found him standing there, under the limes, wearing blue.”
― Susan Fletcher