Nicola Barker > Quotes

“Tattoos are a right of passage. They're a marker of bravery, of maturity, of cultural acceptance. The tattoo represents not only a willingness to accept pain - to endure it - but a need to actively embrace it. Because life is painful - beautiful but painful.......”
― Nicola Barker, The Yips

“I dreamed I saw you dead in a place by the water. A ravaged place. All flat and empty and wide open. And you were covered in some kind of binding. Like a mummy. Something white and reflective, from head to toe. And the light shone on you. Oh, how it shone on you! It glanced off you, and it was like a pure, bright silver. The wind was singing. It sang: you have suffered enough. You have suffered enough. Then death came and he kissed you. Lightly. Gently. Upon the lips. There is nothing beyond, he whispered, only me, only me. There is nothing beyond. Only me.”
― Nicola Barker, Wide Open

“You think it's all rather too "New Age" to be taken seriously, eh?'
'Not at all.'
'But it's an ancient discipline...'
'New Age disciplines invariably are,' Beede said, disparagingly, 'but in the modern world they lack context - we just pick them up and then toss them back down again, we consume them. They have no moral claim on us. No moral value. And without that they're rendered meaningless, fatuous, even.”
― Nicola Barker, Darkmans

“The trigger has been squeezed, the deathly mechanism has been enabled, the fatal course of a bullet has been set. No amount of bleating or praying or wailing of cajoling can halt it or stall it or call it back.”
― Nicola Barker, The Yips

“But like a pretty pleated skirt at a country dance, Lily flounced right on out.”
― Nicola Barker, Wide Open

“And it was that self-same summer—June 5th, if precision is your watchword—that I first set eyes on a stringy southern hemisphere home-boy, a man-boy, a prankish puck by the name of La Roux (with very bad skin and even worse instincts), who sailed into the slow-beating heart of our half-arsed, high-strung, low-bred family, then casually capsized himself, but left us all drowning (now they don’t teach you that at the Sea Scouts, do they?).”
― Nicola Barker, Five Miles from Outer Hope

“The prison was like a set of dirty teeth, and the land around it was like a bad mouth, and the sky above it was like the grey face of the person who owned the teeth and the mouth and didn’t care a damn about either of them.”
― Nicola Barker, Wide Open

“she would always be, at the very best, a dewdrop on life’s river bank.”
― Nicola Barker, Wide Open

“There is no truth. Life is just a series of coincidences, accidents and random urges which we carefully forge – for our own, sick reasons – into a convenient design. Everything is arbitrary. Only art exists to make the arbitrary congeal. Not memory or God or love, even. Only art. The truth is simply an idea, a structure which we employ – in very small doses – to render life bearable. It’s just a convenient mechanism.”
― Nicola Barker

“Her love was a glob of phlegm on life’s high street.”
― Nicola Barker, Wide Open

“Modernity’s like a badly trained dog: try and make it heel, even for a moment, and it turns and bites the hand that fed it.”
― Nicola Barker, Clear: A Transparent Novel

“It was the tail end of summer. It was the beginning of winter. It was autumn, formally, but Ronny hated gradations.”
― Nicola Barker, Wide Open

“He saw the guiding light in his life as a palpable indifference. A supreme, a superb, a spectacular indifference. Ronny shrugged. "If you ate less you might feel better about things. The way I see it, the less you eat, the less energy you have to expend on unnecessary stuff. If you were hungry you probably wouldn't be the slightest bit interested in what I did or didn't do.”
― Nicola Barker, Wide Open

“her clothes were hung on old metal hangers like a threadbare assemblage of frustrated sighs.”
― Nicola Barker, Wide Open

“Her heart was red outside and all clogged up at its centre like a ripe ball of Edam.”
― Nicola Barker, Wide Open

“He was just a boy. She was just a girl. It was biologically determined that things would be complicated.”
― Nicola Barker

“Urban man lives only in dreaming.”
― Nicola Barker

“All creatures are travellers. The most important journeys are the interior ones. The most important and the most hazardous.”
― Nicola Barker

“Complacency’s like a disease to wild things.”
― Nicola Barker

“If the truth was a woman she’d be a whore. She’d be an extremely supple, highly sinuous, ridiculously wanton slut.”
― Nicola Barker

“Nathan’s thoughts were a giant, angry sea tap-tap-tapping on a small dyke wall.”
― Nicola Barker, Wide Open

“She tries to search her heart, but the map is old and the compass is faulty.”
― Nicola Barker

“Sometimes I feel like my whole life has been a long, long wait for something horrible that never actually happened. Like I’ve been in water, up to my neck, fighting to stay afloat, year after year. But if only I’d felt for the bottom I’d have found it. It was there. The ocean bed, just below where I was treading. It was there.”
― Nicola Barker, Wide Open