Charles Lambert > Quotes

“Sometimes you have to give up the easy thing and do the right one,”
― Charles Lambert, The Children's Home

“Rooms are never alone," said the Doctor with a laugh. "Only the people who live them can be alone.”
― Charles Lambert, The Children's Home

“What sense did a mask have, he wondered, if to remove it meant nothing? He”
― Charles Lambert, The Children's Home

“It pleases him how Spell is how the word is made but also, in the hands of the magician, how the world is changed. One letter separates Word from World, and that letter is like the number one, or an 'I', or a shaft of light between almost closed curtains. There is an old letter called a thorn, which jags and tears at the throat as it's uttered. Later he learns that Grammar and Glamour share the same deeper root, which is further magic, and there can be neither magic without that root, nor plant. He's lost in it like Chid in Child, or God reversed into Dog. Somewhere inside him is a colon. A sentence can last for life.”
― Charles Lambert, With a Zero at its Heart

“Perhaps she wasn't ill at all in the end, but simply more revealed.”
― Charles Lambert, The Children's Home

“Sometimes they passed so much time together, Morgan had the impression that his own body had been miraculously doubled, or split in half, and that beside him was the Doctor.

Sometimes he thought of himself as the Doctor.”
― Charles Lambert, The Children's Home

“Besides, I would have never been a satisfactory convict. Convicts leave their mark as often and as deeply as they can.”
― Charles Lambert, The Children's Home

“...there was a person, his eyes, his mouth, a person who might have lived as he lived and have seen and spoken and heard as he did; then one layer down, the hard unfeeling shell that outlives the rest and is indistinguishable at a first glance from a hundred thousand others, the underlying oneness; and, finally, coiled gray matter, the workings of which are all that survive, beyond bone and expression, when the brain that thought and the skull that held the brain are equally gone to dust.”
― Charles Lambert

“People are not simple.”
― Charles Lambert, Little Monsters

“He’d never wanted to know, which is also a sort of knowing.”
― Charles Lambert, The Children's Home

“The family home is where the deepest resentments grow, subtle, relentless as moss, the furring of surfaces organic and gradual, as though life were no longer flesh and blood but bricks and mortar, a suffocation.”
― Charles Lambert, With a Zero at its Heart: A Moving Memoir of Sex, Death, and the Fragmentary Nature of Memory

“Rooms are never alone,' said the Doctor with a laugh. 'Only the people who live in them can be alone. I am alone, perhaps, in mine.”
― Charles Lambert, The Children's Home

“Sometimes I think there is only one authentic loss, and the rest, the other deaths and departures, are echoes of it: we learn how to deal with the loss just once, then apply what we have learned until it becomes a sort of skill. But if this is true, it must be the nature of the first loss that determines how we handle later ones, and this is what frightens me.”
― Charles Lambert, Little Monsters