Alex North > Quotes

“If you leave a door half open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken.
If you play outside alone, soon you won’t be going home.
If your window’s left unlatched, you’ll hear him tapping at the glass.
If you’re lonely, sad, and blue, the Whisper Man will come for you.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“Courage is not the absence of fear, Pete knew. Courage requires fear.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“The devil finds work for idle hands. Bad thoughts find empty heads.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“When there was something awful that had to be faced, it was better to face it immediately; as bad as the event might be, it would occur regardless, and at least that way you wouldn’t have to endure the anticipation as well.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“Perhaps life was just a matter of doing what you thought was best at the time and then living with the consequences as best you could afterward.”
― Alex North, The Shadows

“That was the thing about going to sleep. It kind of scrubbed things. Arguments, worries, whatever. You could be scared or upset about something, and you might think sleep was impossible, but at some point it happened, and when you woke up in the morning the feeling was gone for awhile, like a storm passed during the night.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“Absence of evidence was not evidence of absence.”
― Alex North, The Shadows

“The butterflies didn’t have a choice, after all. That’s what things do. Even in the toughest of circumstances, they keep living.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“But everything is okay until it isn’t. People are there, large as life and taken for granted, and then they aren’t.”
― Alex North, The Shadows

“The only ghosts that existed were in your head. They spoke through you, not to you.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“but grief is a stew with a thousand ingredients, and not all of them are palatable.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“There were always so many reasons to drink, though. Only ever one real reason not to.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“As you get older, it [time] all begins to blur into one. You start to think life was never any kind of straight line. It was always more of a ... scribble.”
― Alex North, The Shadows

“Guilt. Fear. Anger. Once loose, any one of them would charge off, dragging the others along like dogs chained in a pack. And that was no good at all.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“Battles often make more sense from the sky.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“He had loved her as deeply as she loved him, but the gift and receipt of love was a language”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“It was an attempt to make an impact on a world that seemed so oblivious to his existence. It stemmed from a desire to be seen. To be noticed. To be loved. Because that was all any child wanted, deep down.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“The world was full of bad men. Full of bad dreams that didn’t always happen when you were asleep.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“People together, as people should be. He felt a degree of loneliness at that, but you could find pleasure where you looked for it, even in as solitary a life as his.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“Graveyards might have housed the dead below the ground, but what lay above was always for the living; they were the places where people came to deal with the break between what their lives had once been and what they now were. All the times she had come here, she had only really been visiting herself, and her relationship with the past.”
― Alex North, The Shadows

“There were good memories here too. Moments that, looking back on them objectively, had been filled with light. The problem was that what happened later cast such a shadow they were hard to see.”
― Alex North, The Shadows

“Sometimes people want things to be more complicated than they really are.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“It occurred to me that, when my mother died, I would be all that was left of a family I hadn’t known, and for a moment all my adult confidence evaporated and I was left feeling lost and unmoored.”
― Alex North, The Shadows

“The devil finds work for idle hands. Bad thoughts find empty heads. So he kept his hands busy and his mind occupied.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“And while she was sad to see me leave, I think she was also happy that I was heading out into the world, escaping the past and moving forward into a different present without even glancing behind me. Because, however painful it might be, that’s what all good parents have to do in the end.”
― Alex North, The Shadows

“He had loved her as deeply as she loved him, but the gift and receipt of love was a language with foreign grammar to him.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“That thought was so much better. It was the difference between regret and relief, between a cold hearth full of dead, gray ash and a fire that was still alight.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man

“Because that was what parents did, wasn't it? They wanted to protect their children. They wanted the best lives possible for them. And they expected nothing in return for that.”
― Alex North, The Shadows

“Why was not necessarily a question that mattered. Motivations, causes, reasons—they almost always turned out to be mundane and disappointing. What explanation could there possibly be for the horror she had seen in the quarry that afternoon that would make sense of it? Asking why was like diving into a black hole. The deeper you went, the less light you found.”
― Alex North, The Shadows

“Outside, I clicked the padlock back in place, sealing the butterflies within. It seemed remarkable that they'd survived in there for so long in such fruitless and insubstantial conditions. But as I walked back up the drive to the front of the house, I thought about Jake and me, and I realized that was just what happens. The butterflies didn't have a choice, after all. That's what things do. Even in the toughest of circumstances, they keep living.”
― Alex North, The Whisper Man