Siobhan

“Having a wife and children didn’t suit him, but neither did divorce. He was equally devastated by both, and I bet if you pushed him to remember a time when he wasn’t destroyed by anything, he would stand in front of you with his hands on his hips, looking at the ground for a long time, just thinking.”
― Ella Baxter, New Animal

“Sometimes I mistake presence for fondness. Even though those who are absent are normally the ones I love most. Perhaps because so many in my life have said, “I’m here, aren’t I?” when I’ve asked to feel their love.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Parakeet

“A marriage that furnished love and was relieved of its misery at the appropriate time so its participants could go on to love again, isn’t that more of a success?”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Parakeet

“Cars are not attached to anything. They are free to collide with other bodies whenever they want and wreck each other. This would not happen with my bumper car system. Cars would be attached to poles linked to an overarching mechanism, as they are in bumper cars. The worst that can happen in a bumper car is you make a strange face when you smash someone. A strange face that makes the other person think you are uglier than they thought and that maybe there are other ugly things they don’t know about you. But they forget in the next second when they are smashed by someone else. It doesn’t hurt, though, as much as real cars. It doesn’t hurt as much. No response. Human beings, she faxes the next day, develop counterintuitive connections to unexpected things, like inanimate objects, and things they thought they hated and wanted to die, like mice. No response.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland