Melanie Finn > Quotes

“This is what you remember about him: not much, but then you have been assiduous in your forgetting. His red sweater, v-neck, cashmere; the clink of ice-cubes in a glass. He is shadow and voice, but you cannot recall his face. He is behind a closed door, in a forbidden room. He is asleep in his armchair, he is asleep in the driveway, asleep in your sandpit, face down, snoring but not harmless, even then. He is shouting, he is whispering, he is close but also remote as if at the end of a long hallway and you cannot hear him. His words never make any sense, he speaks some other language. His hands sometimes spin away from him like windmills, like pinwheels and Catherine wheels, snapping like firecrackers. There must be pain, but you cannot feel it.

Your skin bruises like apples.”
― Melanie Finn, Away from You

“Memory is narrative. It is not truth. It is the worst witness.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“Some things in life are certain; death, taxes, and that your family will piss you off.”
― Melanie Finn, Away from You

“At any moment the mundane might turn lethal.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“She did what women do and have always done, because the laundry still needs to be folded, the children collected from school or the fields or the workhouse, the dinner has to be made or gathered or harvested or butchered. Women do what needs to be done, they do what is expected, the obligation of their gender. For centuries, for thousands of years, tens of thousands, millions of years, women have been sucking cock and licking floors and going up the stairs just to keep men from making any more trouble. Men mistake the act of submission for the condition of submission. But they don’t know that women split themselves right down the middle, the submitting part and the fuck you part. When did this splitting begin? Rosie regarded Miranda. Had it already, in this small girl-child? She’d received, aged twenty months, her first sexual proposition. How many more to come? Women had holes and men believed it was their right to fill them. Not content with the physical holes, they tried to make existential ones. Drilling, drilling, drilling.”
― Melanie Finn, The Hare

“Detail established truth. The color of the dog. Without detail, truth was a metaphysically unstable idea: too general, too big; cause and effect going all the way back to first dates, to ancestors surviving winter storms, to dinosaurs, to organisms in a puddle.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“How foolish to believe life could change with the lighting of incense, the purchase of rose water, the offering of eggs. And yet, when you have reached the end of yourself, what else is there? When the tangible world has failed you, why not indulge in the possibility that a corner of the universe might stir, send a shiver of atoms through space, that you might be delivered after all.”
― Melanie Finn

“Paying acolytes. How could you trust someone you paid for a service? A prostitute gave you what you wanted. A therapist gave you what you wanted. What a mistake to believe in the sanctity of memory or dreams. A man might as well believe the romantic murmurings of a call girl.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“It’s strange—isn’t it—how I can take all the bits of the story and fit them one way, or another. … There’s a feeling I have now of crowding, shouting possibilities—that every version is true. And none.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“People lived with a lot of awful things, some of them very comfortably”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“That morning. When we were having breakfast. I looked at Markus. The sun was on his face and he was busy eating and didn’t see me and I felt such sadness that my child was leaving me. But it’s what they do; it’s their purpose, to leave you. I don’t think you’re ever ready. Are you?”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“And she felt exactly as the young girl she’d been in his wake, the painful insufficiency of self. She’d clung to him like a buoy in a storm, only to discover he’d had no anchor. He was barely afloat himself.”
― Melanie Finn, The Hare

“That morning. When we were having breakfast. I looked at Markus. The sun was on his face and he was busy eating and didn’t see me and I felt such sadness that my child was leaving me. But it’s what they do; it’s their purpose, to leave you. I don’t think you’re ever ready. Are you? Do you have children, Inspector? You know they’ll grow up and have imperfect lives and people will hurt them and they’ll be unsatisfied and selfish, and so I think maybe by leaving now he’s only known happiness and love.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“Mothers who beat their children to death cried just as hard as those whose children had drowned accidentally in the river.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“Sometimes it took parents years to put their dead child’s possessions away. By then, Strebel had observed, it was too late: the ability to move on had been forfeited. Objects wielded great power. Left out, they became museum pieces, totemic. Artifacts. Packed away, they became memories”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“In the dark, quiet world outside, people were committing unspeakable crimes. Unspeakable, but not unthinkable.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“Chip stared at her, the little man in his tidy whites, and she would wave cheerily. Miranda sucked on rocks as Rosie watched”
― Melanie Finn, The Hare

“...life, like a wire, requires tension on both ends. You care to live and someone else cares that you live. What's the point of holding the slack end?”
― Melanie Finn