Dianne Touchell > Quotes

“Am I sounding creepy? Love is sort of creepy. When you fall in love, you presuppose all sorts of things about the person. You superimpose all kinds of ideals and fantasies on them. You create all manner of unrealistic, untenable, unsatisfiable criteria for that person, automatically guaranteeing their failure and your heartbreak. And what do we call it? Romance. Now that’s creepy.”
― Dianne Touchell, Creepy and Maud

“Beginnings are pitiless things; they are full of promise and hope that they never have to realise.”
― Dianne Touchell, Creepy and Maud

“We have our own place in the space between windows.”
― Dianne Touchell, Creepy and Maud

“Foster had come to believe that people who went away came back eventually, even if they looked a bit different when they climbed back into themselves.”
― Dianne Touchell, Forgetting Foster

“Help. It was the sort of word that was usually screamed. It was the sort of need that usually required screaming. People yelled help when there was a fire or they were injured or someone was attacking them. Other people responded quickly and efficiently to this yelling. But a whispered help, that was different. Whispered helps are full of secrets and shameful desperation. Rather than halve the burden, a whispered help will divide the crisis and let it gain strength and complexity: a sort of emotional mitosis. Not unlike passing a disease on to the one trying to save you. And if nothing would change as a result of the whisper anyway, if all it would do is bring about the inevitable outcome, only sooner, then why bother? Better just to fall down and wait, isn’t it?”
― Dianne Touchell, A Small Madness

“The best my mum could up with for our cat was Fluffy. Not a thought went into that one. Fluffy is the name you give to a disposable cat. A cat that, should it end up tyre gravy, is replaced by the time the kids get home from school, with nothing said.”
― Dianne Touchell