Carys Bray > Quotes

“When you grow up in the saddest chapter of someone else’s story, you’re forever skating on the thin ice of their memories.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“Anyone can be brave for five minutes or an hour or two. The bravery no one talks about is the hardest bravery of all. When you get up in the morning even though you'd rather be dead, that's brave.”
― Carys Bray, A Song for Issy Bradley

“One of the surprising things about adulthood is how few people accompany you there and what a relief it is to occasionally talk to someone who knew the child-you and the teenaged-you; someone who has seen all versions, every update, and stuck with you through all of it.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“She is incomplete, a part-written recipe. How can she imagine what she will be if she only knows half of her ingredients?”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“Of course no one accused the old woman of being a witch. But she was foreign. Her words percolated up the tunnel of her throat , espresso-thick and strong. Bad weather had eroded her face. Some believed that the sun had crisped her skin into coriaceous pleats. Others blamed the chaw of a wintry climate. No one knew where she came from, though lots of people privately thought that perhaps she ought to go back.”
― Carys Bray, Sweet Home

“Happiness is Grandad saving links to cat videos in a Word document so he can share them when she visits.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“Love. It fills you up. It's not that you can't eat or sleep, just that you don't need to because you're running on feelings - buzzing, elated, surging with it. Where does it go after its object is gone?... It doesn't go anywhere. You can decrease its volume and increase its density, you can bundle it up, tight, but you still have to lug it around with you.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“Sing your way home at the close of the day. Sing your way home; drive the shadows away. Smile every mile, for whenever you roam It will brighten your road, It will lighten your load If you sing your way home.”
― Carys Bray, A Song for Issy Bradley

“He was struck by a bolt of missing her.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“Sometimes it's the wait that's the best bit; knowing something's coming, enjoying the feeling of it being about to happen - like Christmas Eve, which is always better than Christmas Day.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“Loving someone for herself involved also loving her when she was not herself.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“I know. I'll listen one of these days.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“It sometimes feels as if everything is moving around him and he is stuck, feet in concrete.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“And there's the happiness, again. Flickering, moth-like, just under her sternum. She presses a hand up to the place. If she could leave the embered blackness behind her eyelids and travel to the spot where feelings are made, perhaps she could farm the right ones. She has recently become attuned to the way Dad takes the temperature of her mood and attempts to chart it... Every night before bed, he says, 'Three happy things?' It's pretty easy. There's always weather of some sort: sun, snow, rain, wind. There's food - her favourite cereal or a nice pudding. And one other bit of happiness, which can be absolutely anything: clean sheets, a book, one of Dad's ideas - it doesn't matter whether the idea will actually happen, the optimism dominoes from him to her, regardless.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“He has made Issy’s recovery contingent on her faith and she doesn’t know how she will ever forgive him.”
― Carys Bray, A Song for Issy Bradley

“I have always thought that there are two types of imagination: hopeful and inoculating. Even as a child I tended to avoid the hopeful kind, as a way of dodging disappointment. I dispensed with happy daydreams out of the same superstition that causes people to sidestep ladders. I preferred to use my imagination for prevention rather than cure: a means of injecting myself with enough disappointment and terror to protect against a future epidemic. It seemed that imagining the worst might prevent it from ever happening.”
― Carys Bray, Sweet Home

“Fate's all right if everything's going well. Makes you feel all important. Deserving, Like your happiness is meant. But when things are shit, you're trapped by it, helpless, like those myths where the gods muck about with humans, for a laugh.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“Dad calls it the tablecloth trick. Here she goes, everything's lovely, now she'll whip the cloth out from under it.”
― Carys Bray

“Happiness is swelling like a gum bubble - something will burst it later, but for now it is the loveliest of feeling.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“He reminded himself that the people she loved were hers to criticise. He could loathe them silently.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“Like the potted seeds in the greenhouse, he grew into his surroundings, warm and fed and watered. And all the time he was growing he anticipated the day when he would be too big, too important for his container, when a transfer would be necessary and he would be uprooted and transplanted to somewhere better, a place where he could grow without restraint. In the meantime, life was ordinary, unremarkable and occasionally boring. It was, looking back, wonderful.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You

“..grief never goes away. And that's no bad thing - it's only the other side of love, after all.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You