The Lighthouse Witches Quotes

“I used to tell myself that I regretted the choices I'd made in my life. But every choice, including the wrong ones, made me who I was... -both the good and bad experiences strengthened you, shaped you. We are not just made of blood and bone- we are made of stories. Some of us have our stories told for us, other write their own- you wrote yours.”
― C.J. Cooke, The Lighthouse Witches

“I noticed chartreuse lichen scabbing the rocks, the lick and suck of tide against sea-smoothed stones, how every single one of the shells in the bay was different; white limpet shells and ear-shaped mussel shells; kelp fronds, the ones like bronze ribbons, and cream ones like bandages, their stems like bone joints; and, of course, the ocean, that perpetual shapeshifter: one day a disc of hammered gold, the next wild and rearing, like a thousand white horses. I noticed how the ocean had moods, just like a person.”
― C J Cooke

“We are not just made of blood and bone – we are made of stories. Some of us have our stories told for us, others write their own – you wrote yours.”
― C J Cooke

“I was wearing another of Saffy’s dresses and a touch of red lipstick. I looked nice. I even liked my hair. I felt like I had been in hiding for years, and now, for the first time, I felt I was coming out of the cave. Right as my time was running out.”
― C J Cooke

“Forgiveness is a kind of time travel, only better, because it sutures the wounds of the past with the wisdom of the present in the same moment as it promises a better future.”
― C J Cooke

“I’ve put plenty of blankets in the cupboards for you to coorie down in the evenings.”
― C J Cooke

“Some of the younger population had inherited crofts that they didn’t want to live in, so they’d started renting them out. The older population objected strongly both to the younger islanders moving away (‘all of them want to live in Edinburgh or London,’ she told us with a sneer) and, as a result, drawing ‘outsiders’ to the island to rent out the crofts.”
― C J Cooke

“The punishments meted out to the witches of North Berwick were recounted from generation to generation. Agnes Sampson, an elderly woman and a healer from Haddington, was the ringleader. She’d been kept in a scold’s bridle, a fearful instrument wrought of iron that enclosed the head. Four sharp blades penetrated the mouth of the witch to keep her quiet, and doubtless to ruin her tongue for a long time thereafter. In Agnes’ case, the bridle was chained to the wall of her cell, and therefore she was forced to endure countless days unable to speak, eat, or sleep, enduring the humiliation of opening her bowels or bladder without being able to attend to herself, and doubtless in a terrible amount of pain without a moment’s relief. After spending days thus, she confessed to raising the storm in partnership with the Devil, though I always thought that if I’d had to suffer days on end in a cell wearing such a monstrous instrument I’d have confessed to being Satan himself. No mercy was bestowed for Agnes’ confession, however – she was swiftly garrotted and burnt at the stake.”
― C J Cooke

“Saffy had never been an easy child. Defiant and headstrong, she was born with a will already forged in iron. Nonetheless, I’d always expected that having a teenager would be a turning point, the part of parenthood where everything got better. Throughout those early years of nappies, teething, tantrums and night terrors I’d consoled myself by imagining a time when my girls were old enough to be self-sufficient. Maybe then I wouldn’t be pulled in three different directions, always spinning plates. But Saffy’s defiance had grown into disrespect and contempt. I felt as though I needed an emotional suit of armour to protect myself from her spiteful comments. She resented every thought, cell, breath, and ounce of me.”
― C J Cooke

“I’d had such high hopes for motherhood. And I wanted everything for my children. But every single day I had to confront the glaring reality that I simply wasn’t able to provide the kind of life they deserved. And it crushed me.”
― C J Cooke

“He doesn’t get that truth and memory can be too complex, too tentacled, to boil down to a linear narrative. That sometimes, silence is a form of survival.”
― C J Cooke

“She tries to force memories to the surface of her mind, picturing them as stones on the bottom of a lake that she has to push upwards. But it doesn’t work like that. Memories, like stones, have their own gravity.”
― C J Cooke

“I’ll take care of them. I do a bit of pest control, on the side.’ ‘Didn’t you say you do plastering on the side?’ He cocked an eyebrow. ‘There’s a lot of “on the side” when you live on an island.”
― C J Cooke

“...a single parent, an honest-to-God buck-stops-with-me single parent was a rare species.”
― C J Cooke

“Most of the year he worked at sea on a whaling ship, and when he was home he worked as a handyman, endowed with a knack for sniffing out both the problem and a solution to virtually any constructional issue by merely setting eyes on it.”
― C J Cooke

“She remembers that sphagnum moss is an antiseptic, that the Celts used it to pack their wounds after battle. Soldiers in World War One did the same. She likes to cling on to bits of information like that, the type that links the ancient past to the near-present. It makes the strangeness of the present less strange.”
― C J Cooke

“I tried to force myself to enjoy every detail, every second of time. When I looked out at the beach, I imagined each grain of sand like a measure of time that I’d been allotted. I could either let them run through my hands or I could stop and pay attention.”
― C J Cooke

“Each week day I dropped the girls off to school at eight am, then worked solidly until I collected them from afterschool club at five-thirty, often returning to the Longing once they were in bed. I enjoyed Finn’s conversational tour of Lòn Haven, and occasionally his death metal tapes. Here, on Lòn Haven, I was untethered from the past. Everything I’d carried for the last fifteen years – the shock of my pregnancy with Saffy, the grief at losing Sean, and now, that terrifying phone call – was gobbled up by the ravenous tide. And witnessing the Longing transform, stroke by stroke, into something a little less knackered, its former glory beginning to creep back, was rewarding. I felt that, maybe, I could start again, too.”
― C J Cooke

“Any other time, I’d have rejected the idea of a ‘healing tide’, of anything but medicine having the power to cure. But belief is a powerful thing. Maybe, I thought, if I put aside my scepticism and willed myself to believe that the cancer could disappear, it would.”
― C J Cooke

“Fear, combined with a touch of desperation, makes you much more open to buying into otherwise crazy practices.”
― C J Cooke

“Missing someone you love for an extended period of time can and will lead to madness, every bit as much as a wound that is not cleaned will lead to a festering sore, and thence an illness that spreads throughout the body. The only boundary between desire and obsession is time; if you crave someone long enough, it becomes a need. It becomes your ever-waking thought. The only thing you live for.”
― C J Cooke

“I knew intimately how devastating it was to lose someone you love, how your entire life can change – or end – in the blink of an eye.”
― C J Cooke

“We form stories about our lives to create meaning out of them – without meaning, they feel shapeless, and without purpose. When something lies beyond the realm of meaning, it’s terrifying.”
― C J Cooke

“These are machair orchids,’ he told me. ‘I grow them on my land. They’re native to the western isles, where my mother was born. They’re fragile as soap bubbles, these things. I grow them in a greenhouse.”
― C J Cooke

“Why don’t you like him?’ He screwed up his face. ‘It’s nothing personal. He’s just a bit of a bawbag.”
― C J Cooke

“…before I knew what was happening Finn had cupped my face in his hands and was kissing me, a sensation at once startling and welcome, the closeness of him so natural that all the fear I’d had about men and love and relationships managed to subside, just for that moment.”
― C J Cooke

“…sometimes you can miss someone so badly you just want to believe you’ve found them, you know?”
― C J Cooke

“A limpet is a creature without eyes, limbs, without so much as a brain, and yet it creates for itself a spot on the rock that is its home. It leaves its mark on that spot, wearing away the rock until its shell forms a perfect seal. The home scar. Maybe time is like that. Maybe we always move exactly to where and when we belong, even without realizing it. It certainly feels like that for me. As though everything in my whole life has led me to where I am now.”
― C J Cooke

“I used to tell myself that I regretted the choices I’d made in my life. But every choice, including the wrong ones, made me who I was.”
― C J Cooke

“…both the good and bad experiences strengthened you, shaped you.”
― C J Cooke