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“We watched the children playing, and the people walking past, and we heard their voices and they were all strangers, with their wide staring eyes and their evil open mouths” (205).

“I went down to the creek and buried Uncle Julian’s initialed gold pencil by the water, so the creek would always speak his name” (201).

“I was troubled to think that Uncle Julian might vanish altogether, with his papers in a box and his chair on the barricade and his toothbrush thrown away and even the smell of Uncle Julian gone from his room, but when the ground was soft Constance planted a yellow rosebush at Uncle Julian’s spot on the lawn…” (201).

“I am thinking that we are on the moon, but it is not quite as I supposed it would be” (195).

“Slowly the pattern of our days grew, and shaped itself into a happy life” (193).

“…perhaps there would never be noise in the world again” (190).

“Certainly Uncle Julian buried in flowers, swarmed over by flowers, would not resemble the Uncle Julian we had seen every day” (189).

Marricat & neurodivergence - always the literal meaning

“…looking at one another; now, I thought, now we will know how safe we are” (187).

“It was good to run, and good to come back again to our house and see the kitchen door standing open and the warm light inside” (186).

“The kitchen was warm and comfortable and familiar and clean” (185).

“We were going to be very happy, I thought. There were a great many things to do, and a whole new pattern of days to arrange, but I thought we were going to be very happy” (183).

Crazy statement after murdering your family and having 90% of your house burn down

“We’ll know why it’s there, and no one else will ever see it” (183).

“I hope he was warm when he died. Perhaps he remembered the sun for a minute” (183).

“I could feel a breath of air on my cheek; it came from the sky I could see, but it smelled of smoke and ruin. Our house was a castle, turreted and opened to the sky” (177).

“I stood in the open doorway and saw that the lawn was marked with the tires of cars and the feet which had danced” (173).

“Although I did not perceive it then, time and the orderly pattern of our old days had ended” (171).

“Nothing was orderly, nothing was planned; it was not like any other day” (169).

“It seemed that all the wealth and hidden treasure of our house had been found out and torn and soiled”(168).

“I thought that we had somehow not found our way back correctly through the night, that we had somehow lost ourselves and come back through the wrong gap in time, or the wrong door, or the wrong fairy tale” (167-168).

“It had never been spoken of between us, not once in six years” (161).

“There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out” (143).

“I looked at the house with all the richness of love I contained” (141).

“I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and the bark grew over his mouth” (129).

“I sat very quietly, listening to what she had almost said. Time was running shorter, tightening around our house, crushing me” (122).

“I stood outside in the sunlight and looked in at him lying still in the dark room and tried to think of ways I might be kinder” (117).

“I watched her while she swept up the glass, today would be a glittering day, full of tiny sparkling thing”(89).