Young Mungo Quotes

“It was a nothing that felt like an everything.”
― Douglas Stuart, Un lugar para Mungo

“Mungo's capacity for love frustrated her. His loving wasn't selflessness, he simply couldn't help it. Mo-Maw needed so little and he produced too much, so that it all seemed a horrible waste. It was a harvest no one had seeded, and it blossomed from a vine no one had tended. It should have withered years ago, like hers had, like Hamish's had, yet Mungo had all this love to give and it lay about him like ripened fruit and nobody bothered to gather it up.”
― Douglas Stuart

“Mungo looked both up and down the hill, and then he kissed James quickly on the lips. It was like hot buttered toast when you were starving. It was that good.”
― Douglas Stuart

“What did I do?" asked Mungo. 'What did I do?'. It was what he had been trained to say. Never 'what's wrong with you?' or 'are you okay?'. Only 'what did I do'?
(Young Mungo)”
― Douglas Stuart

“Waves of loveliness ebbed over him followed by waves of shame. They came like Jodie alternating the hot and cold taps and trying to balance a bath with him already in it. This time, though, he couldn't pull his legs to his chest and escape it, he would be burned or he would be chilled as it happened. There was no pulling way.
(Young Mungo)”
― Douglas Stuart

“As Mungo leaned over the water he focused on his reflection. He wondered what it was the men had recognized in him. Where was this signal he could not see, the semaphore he had never meant to send?...He wanted to find the signal, and he wanted to end its transmission.
(Young Mungo)”
― Douglas Stuart

“The men looked at him as though they knew what lay inside his soul, things he still had not even admitted to himself.
(Young Mungo)”
― Douglas Stuart

“He hadn’t known that the sky could hold so many hues – or he hadn’t paid it any mind before. Did anyone in Glasgow look up?”
― Douglas Stuart, Young Mungo

“But the worst of the pain was deep inside him. Somewhere above his stomach and below his heart. He tried to search it with his fingers, but he couldn't get at it, and it grew.
Young Mungo”
― Douglas Stuart

“There it was again, the road, the path, the turning, the warning.
(Young Mungo)”
― Douglas Stuart

“[Mo-Maw] animated every gesture he made: the timid smile, the thrumming nerves, the anxious biting, the worry, the pleasing, the way he made himself smaller in any room he was in, the watchful way he stood on the edge before committing, and the kindness, the big, big love.
(Young Mungo)”
― Douglas Stuart

“He was watching, and he was waiting, and he was leaving all at the same time.
(Young Mungo)”
― Douglas Stuart