Neil Bartlett > Quotes

“The stories we are told as children do, undoubtedly, mark us for life. They are often stories of dark and terrible things, and we are usually told them just before the lights are turned out and we are left alone; but we love them. We love them when we first hear them, and even when we are grown, and think we have forgotten them entirely, they never lose their power over us.”
― Neil Bartlett, Skin Lane

“People think that it is in the tangle of bodies, in the actual congress, that one person invades another and takes possession of them; that it is on the bed that we give ourselves up. Well it is true that there is a surrender there that is unlike any other, but the real time they get under your skin is when you spend these hours alone preparing for them; imagining them. The hours when you find yourself wondering if these sheets would be too hot with two people under them. Or when you lie there on your back with both eyes open, as Mr F lies now, in the desperate early hours of that Monday morning, wishing that your nightmare would come back and plague you, just so that you can see your beloved one last time.”
― Neil Bartlett, Skin Lane

“I saw a painting once where the artist had actually done that--signed his work in blood. ... When I saw that, I thought it was as if the man who had painted the picture wanted to say to me, Well, you did ask what this actually cost.”
― Neil Bartlett, Skin Lane

“It is a law of nature that a dream carried for too long inside you must, eventually, begin to rot.”
― Neil Bartlett, Skin Lane

“No woman ever gets given a fur coat for good reasons; if it's not to keep her on her back, it's to get her off his.”
― Neil Bartlett, Skin Lane

“As he lay there, he was sure that he could still feel the memory of that strange hand cupping the back of his neck; and he couldn't believe how empty his mouth felt, now that it only had his own tongue in it.”
― Neil Bartlett, Skin Lane

“He wanted to know when he was going to kiss the same person goodnight when the lights went out and then hello again the next morning when the sun came up. He wanted to know how he was ever going to make that happen.”
― Neil Bartlett, The Disappearance Boy

“Look at him, lying there. Why should he need me to give him strength--to watch over him, and always be worrying how he's feeling? Surely he'll find it himself. Isn't that what we believe, that we do always somehow find the strength? That the path will lead out of the forest; that the riddle will be solved; that the child never dies.”
― Neil Bartlett, Skin Lane

“he had already learnt never to assume that people made love in the same way as they talked”
― Neil Bartlett, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall

“Imagine your body becoming that of a stranger. Imagine the sensation of it being not yours, as you discover what it feels like to do this, or to have this happen to you, for the very first time. Imagine it happening with sickening slowness, or with shocking speed, that discovery.

And then imagine knowing it has come too late.”
― Neil Bartlett, Skin Lane

“I suppose I just don't like to think (or believe) that once a man has acquired the gift of dreaming, he should (or even can) ever lose it.”
― Neil Bartlett, Skin Lane