Emma Healey > Quotes

“I remember when the houses used to whiz by as I walked—nearly running—to and from home. Ma would ask me afterwards about what I’d seen, whether certain neighbours were out, what I thought about someone’s new garden wall. I’d never noticed; it had all gone past in a flash. Now I have plenty of time to look at everything, and no one to tell what I’ve seen.”
― Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing

“But it’s not true. I forget things—I know that—but I’m not mad. Not yet. And I’m sick of being treated as if I am. I’m tired of the sympathetic smiles and the little pats people give you when you get things confused, and I’m bloody fed up with everyone deferring to Helen rather than listening to what I have to say.”
― Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing

“I don’t look up. It’s such a little thing—knowing where to put cutlery—but I feel like I’ve failed an important test. A little piece of me is gone.”
― Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing

“Oh, Helen,” I say. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. That girl you’ve hired, she doesn’t do any work. None. I’ve watched her.” “Who are you talking about now? What girl?” “The girl,” I say. “She leaves plates by the sink and there are clothes all over the floor of her room.” Helen grins and bites her lip. “Pretty good description. Mum, that’s Katy.”
― Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing

“My reflection always gives me a shock. I never really believed I would age, and certainly not like this.”
― Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing

“An ancient noise, like a fox bark, makes an attempt at the edges of my brain.”
― Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing

“I feel rather drab and shy for a few minutes. But then I remember that I am old and nobody is looking at me.”
― Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing

“Lost,” I say, dropping the photo on to the counter. “I’ve lost Elizabeth.” She pauses a moment and straightens to look at the photo. “Oh, was it an advert you wanted?” Breath floods into my lungs. “Yes. Yes, that’s it. I wanted to place an advert.” “I’ll get you a form. Awful, cats, aren’t they?” I nod, feeling as though I’ve missed some part of the conversation. I nod, but I quite like cats, and I wonder what this woman has against them. “I remember when my auntie lost her Oscar. She was frantic. Missing for weeks, he was. Found him in a beach hut in the end. Have you asked your neighbours to look in their sheds?” I stare at the woman. I can’t imagine finding Elizabeth in a shed. But perhaps it is a good suggestion. Perhaps it’s just me it doesn’t make sense to. I borrow a pen and write beach hut on a scrap of paper.”
― Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing

“The sun’s in my eyes and it’s difficult to see. The shape of her is distorted by the light, circles of her silhouette removed as if by a pastry cutter.”
― Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing

“Sometimes, when I'm having a sort-through or a clear-out, I find photos of my youth, and it's a shock to see everything on black and white. I think my granddaughter believes we were actually grey-skinned, with dull hair, always posing in a shadowed landscape. But I remember the town as being almost too bright to look at when I was a girl. I remember the deep blue of the sky and the dark green of the pines cutting through it, the bright red of the local brick houses and the orange carpet of pine needles under our feet. Nowadays - though I'm not sure the sky is still occasionally blue and most of the houses are still there, and the trees still drop their needles - nowadays, the colours seem faded, as if I live in an old photograph.”
― Emma Healey

“I have an awful feeling I’m supposed to know, and that this is some kind of treat. I don’t think it’s my birthday, but perhaps an anniversary. Patrick’s death? It would be just like Helen to remember and make it a “special occasion.” But I can see from the bare trees out on the street that it’s the wrong time of year. Patrick died in the spring.”
― Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing

“Although it’s just as likely to be a son,” Carla says. I’ve missed some earlier part of her speech, and I don’t know what she’s talking about. “You’re lucky you have a daughter. They say sons steal from their old mothers. It was in a report I saw on the news.” “But I do have a son,” I say. “Millions of pounds, stolen every year.” “I don’t have millions of pounds,” I say. “And all kinds of antiques. Georgian, Victorian.” “I don’t have any antiques, either.” Oh, this is no good. What sort of a conversation”
― Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing

“Do you think you feel sad or angry more than you feel happy or optimistic?”
― Emma Healey, Whistle in the Dark

“In a car you could just sit, you didn’t have to be getting on with anything, you didn’t have to prepare vegetables, or dig the garden or run sheets through the mangle.”
― Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing

“Happiness was doing everything wrong and finding that things had turned out okay, anyway. Happiness was obliviousness...”
― Emma Healey, Whistle in the Dark

“My fault for being a young girl, I thought.”
― Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing

“The bad news is your flaws don’t come from nowhere. The world is deeply fucked from every angle; its damage is incomprehensibly vast and ancient, hooked into the future and printed upon you in endless, innumerable ways. You can’t reverse it. But art can unmake you differently. A perfect pop song, the kind that knees you in the chest while you’re standing in a checkout line, is the sound of something familiar resolving into something transcendent. A good poem finds the cracks in the foundations of your thinking and outlines them with glitter, or sets the whole building on fire. People make things with money they get from the government, or from jobs, or from stealing, and one time out of every 500 that you go to see those things they’ve made, some small corner of your world will come unlaced because of it. That’s not a lot, but it’s proof that the work of living can be more than just gesture: that there is more to do with structure than to surrender or be crushed by it. You can always be made a little more unsure; you can always be taken a little more apart.”
― Emma Healey

“There are foour books with cream covers next to it, mysteries set in Russia. I don't think I'm quite up to that. I have enough mystery in my life as it is.”
― Emma Healey

“home?”
― Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing