Rooz Roo > Rooz's Quotes

“Reading is a bit like hallucinating.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“Thinking about the past is like digging up graves”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“The worst thing about this illness isn’t the things it makes me believe, or what it makes me do. It’s not the control that it has over me, or even the control it’s allowed other people to take.
Worse than all of that is how I have become selfish.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“Writing about the past is a way of reliving it, a way of seeing it unfold all over again. We place memories on pieces of paper to know they will always exist.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“Some memories refuse to be locked in time or place, they are always present.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“I should write about why he left.

But there are different versions of truth. If we meet each other in the street, glance away and look back, we might look the same, feel the same, think the same, but the subatomic particles, the smallest parts of us that make every other part, will have rushed away, been replaced at impossible speeds. We will be completely different people. Everything changes all the time.

Truth changes.
Here are three truths.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“..think back through your own life, to when you were eight or nine years old. See if the memories you have are the ones you might expect. or if they are fragments, dislocated moments, a smell here, a feeling there. The unlikeliest conversations and places. We don't choose what we keep - not at that age. Not ever, really.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“Try and remember that if you can. Hold onto it through everything else that happens in life, through all the things that might make you want to forget - keep it safe somewhere.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“That was sort of our family portrait. It's not the kind of thing you think you would miss. Maybe you don't even notice it at all those thousands of times, sitting between your mum and dad on the big green couch with your brother on the carpet getting in the way of the telly. Maybe you don't even notice that.

But you notice it when he isn't there anymore. You notice so many places where he isn't, and you hear so many of the things he doesn't say.

I do.

I hear them all the time.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“Her brother has a disease, an illness with the shape and sound of a snake. It slithers through the branches of our family tree. It must have broken her heart, to know that I was next.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“Once-upon-a-time we buried the memories we didn't want.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“I can only describe reality as I know it. I'm doing my best, and promise to keep trying. Shake on it.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“Some things in life are exactly as we imagine.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“If I look closely I can see we have the same colour eyes, not me and Simon, but me and the boy who is also me, the boy who I can no longer recognise, with whom I no longer share a single thought, worry, or hope.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“I need to slow down because I want to explain how my world slowed down. I also need to talk about how life has a shape and a size, and how it can be made to fit into something small – like a house.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“She's known sadness, and it has made her kind.”
― Nathan Filer, Where the Moon Isn't

“I picked up a mug with the complicated name of a medication stamped across the side, and a slogan about Treating Today for Tomorrow. They're handed out to places like this by visiting drug companies. Last time I went in the office to borrow the Nursing Dictionary, I counted three mugs, a mouse mat, a bunch of pens, two Post-it note booklets and the wall clock - all sporting the brands of different medicines. It's like being in prison and having to look at adverts for fucking locks.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“In the 1970s, a group of researchers got themselves deliberately confined to mental asylums across United States. They did this by pretending to hear voices. They pretended to hear a voice saying, Empty, Dull and Thud.
But as soon as they were admitted to the wards, they stopped pretending and never mention the voice again.
And here's the mad part
The hospital staff outright refused to believe they were better, and kept them locked up anyway - some of them for months on end -each forced into accepting they had a mental illness, and agreeing to take drugs as a condition of their release. This is what labels do. They stick.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“Every test successfully met is rewarded by some growth in intuitive knowledge, strengthening of character, or initiation into a higher consciousness.”
― Paul Brunton, Healing of the Self, the Negatives: Notebooks

“In every crisis, doubt or confusion, take the higher path - the path of compassion, courage, understanding and love.”
― Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power

“If only one person were perfectly informed there could never be a general crisis. But the only perfectly informed person is God, and he does not play the stock market.”
― Robert Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master