Meg Rosoff > Quotes

“I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“I am almost a hundred years old; waiting for the end, and thinking about the beginning.

There are things I need to tell you, but would you listen if I told you how quickly time passes?

I know you are unable to imagine this.

Nevertheless, I can tell you that you will awake someday to find that your life has rushed by at a speed at once impossible and cruel. The most intense moments will seem to have occurred only yesterday and nothing will have erased the pain and pleasure, the impossible intensity of love and its dog-leaping happiness, the bleak blackness of passions unrequited, or unexpressed, or unresolved.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was

“I was dying, of course, but then we all are. Every day, in perfect increments, I was dying of loss.
The only help for my condition, then as now, is that I refused to let go of what I loved. I wrote everything down, at first in choppy fragments; a sentence here, a few words there, it was the most I could handle at the time. Later I wrote more, my grief muffled but not eased by the passage of time.
When I go back over my writing now I can barely read it. The happiness is the worst. Some days I can't bring myself to remember. But I will not relinquish a single detail of the past. What remains of my life depends on what happened six years ago.
In my brain, in my limbs, in my dreams, it is still happening.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“The things that break your heart when you think there`s nothing left to break”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“After all this time, I know exactly where I belong. Here. With Edmond. And that's how I live now.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“Every war has turning points and every person too.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was

“The facts of his existence are plain. I know that he will never silence those unspeakable voices. He heard how people killed, and how they died and their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him. He didn't know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself. You could see that from the scars on him.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“If you haven't been in a war and are wondering how long it takes to get used to losing everything you think you need or love, I can tell you the answer is no time at all.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“On the warm stone walls, climbing roses were just coming into bloom and great twisted branches of honeysuckle and clematis wrestled each other as they tumbled up and over the top of the wall. Against another wall were white apple blossoms on branches cut into sharp crucifixes and forced to lie flat against the stone. Below, the huge frilled lips of giant tulips in shades of white and cream nodded in their beds. They were almost finished now, spread open too far, splayed, exposing obscene black centers. I've never had my own garden but I suddenly recognized something in the tangle of this one that wasn't beauty. Passion, maybe. And something else. Rage. ”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“I noticed that once you realize
someone's watching you it's pretty hard not to find yourself
watching them back.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“Staying alive was what we did to pass the time.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“After all this time, I know exactly where I belong.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“I didn't seem to have that effect on anyone but it would have been a waste for both of us to be saints.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“I felt a momentary urge to leap into the sea and swim free of the present. ”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was

“Maybe we shouldn't be living this way, without grass and trees, and ducks, always under pressure, always trying to catch up, never enough time or energy for the things we love, if we can even remember what those things are.”
― Meg Rosoff, Jonathan Unleashed

“Perhaps the way to succeed is to think of life on Earth as a colossal joke, a creation of such immense stupidity that the only way to live is to laugh until you think your heart will break.”
― Meg Rosoff, There Is No Dog

“She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.'
'Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?”
― Meg Rosoff, The Bride's Farewell

“Somewhere along the line I'd lost the will not to eat.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“If there was ever a more perfect day in the history of time it isn't one I've heard about.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“And after awhile of this my brain and my body and every single inch of me that was alive was flooded with the feeling that I was starving, starving for Edmond.

And what a coincidence, that was the feeling I loved best in the world.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“I guess the difference between Gin and me is that when Gin got shut in the barn she thought Edmond didn't love her anymore but because I could feel Edmond out there somewhere always loving me I didn't have to howl all night.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“At the time, I didn't have the insight to wonder at the transient nature of despair, but now that I'm older I've seen how little it takes to turn a person's life around for better or worse. An event will do, or an Idea. Another person. An idea of a person. ”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was

“I can't even trust my own imaginary dog. How much lower can a person get?”
― Meg Rosoff

“Osbert was the only one who didn't seem suspicious. He was so interested in the Decline of Western Civilization that he missed the version of it taking place under his nose.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“It's not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle. ”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was

“It's a strange sensation to live inside another person's life, to wonder all the time what he is doing, or thinking or feeling.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was

“I guess there was a war going on somewhere in the
world that night but it wasn't one that could touch us.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“Time erodes us all.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was