Quotes from Nikki Gemmell

Our natural and happiest life is when we lose ourselves in the exquisite absorption of home.

And I am in love with light. Lock me in the sunshine.

There were the endless birthday nights and New Year's Eves of just you in your bed and no one else. There was the welling up at weddings, the glittery eye-prick, when all the couples would get up to dance. Sometimes it felt like your heart was crazed with cracks like your grandmother's old saucers. Sometimes the sight of a Saturday afternoon couple laughing in a park would splinter it completely.

You're living your days at the moment how a sheep grazes, meandering, not engaged with anything much.

No one except your husband knows of the cautiousness at the heart of your life. Your adulthood has been a progressive retreat from curiosity and wonder, an endless series of delays and procrastinations. You wanted to be so much, once, but life kept on getting in the way... You settled. Shunned creativity, flight, risk, never had the courage to give a dream, any dream, a go.

And I am in love with light. Lock me in the sunshine.

An emptiness when you realize the loneliest you've ever been is within a marraige, as a wife

Alone you're refinding a glittering, a clarity, you're finding your distilled self. ...You think of the two types of aloneness you've known recently: this wonderful, sparkly, soul-refreshing type, and the despairing loneliness that sucks the breath from your life.

no matter how much Theo achieves and acquires and out-dazzles everyone else, she never seems content. She's taught you that people who shine more lavishly that everyone else seem to be penalized by discontent, as if they're being punished for craving a brighter life. I've been knocked down so many times I can't remember the number plates, she said once.

You don't dare to think ahead too much, for you don't want this melted under the heat of your attention, don't want it gone from your life.

You feel you're learning everything about love as you watch him, from the other side. He imagines you leaving your cozy London world for a man in his thirties who has no real job, who still travels on buses, who's never found a firm footing with his life. The poet, the dreamer, and you would have fallen for it once. But you're too old, now. You just want to fuck.

So, he feels now, that he doesn't have to try. And you want him more than you ever have before.

Let there be no hesitations, no regrets, no compromises - they are at once cowardly and vain.

The grief is not over, it will never be over. It still trips me up in unexpected moments, stumbling me all over again. What does it: a reminisce with Paul, the sight of a mate laughing so easily with their mum, a Klimt painting we both loved. Simple things. Two steps forward, one step back, righting myself and then not. But the moving forward is stronger, swifter now; the seam of melancholy more hidden. Yes, climbing back into the world. Firm.

An English friend says Australia seems so messy to her: 'Because of all the overhead wires - we don't have them like you do. Your country towns seem so untidy. The barbed wire for fences, all of that'.

You know in this moment that Gabriel is at your mercy, you can do what you want, he is completely yours and with the knowledge of that something goes,you can feel it slip from you like a fish through the net.

You feel something you haven't for years: it's to do with university parties with bathtubs of alcohol and the smell of hamburgers on fingers and beer in a kiss. You should have been disgusted by all that but you weren't. You'd be wet so quick; to get their clothes off, to have their weight upon you, to be rammed against a wall with your leg curled up.

Have faith in the wisdom of that we call change

He] starts to talk and stops, feeling his way, as if it's all clogged up rusty inside.

She can't catch on to slumber, the relief of oblivion.

Dar a inceput sa te plictiseasca traiul in mijlocul panzei de fantezii pe care ai tesut-o de-a lungul timpului. Caci un barbat adevarat s-a prins in ea si a inceput sa traga de firele ei de matase.

Our natural and happiest life is when we lose ourselves in the exquisite absorption of home.

And so begin again by doing what I really want to do. Work. Aspiring to an existence with a lot of quiet in it. Turning from people I don't needing my life. Shunning bits busyness. Finding the courage to say no. I need to be good at being alive again.

Suffering should always open the door to wisdom.