Quotes from Elizabeth Haynes

Nobody can see pain. They have no frame of reference for pain that's happening to someone else. They can only see inactivity - which they interpret as laziness.

You never realise what loneliness is until it creeps up on you - like a disease, it is, something that happens to you gradually.

That before-and-after-feel, as though this was going to be the end of one time and the beginning of another.

I dreamed of death the way previously I'd dreamed of the pain leaving me, and the way before that I'd dreamed of gardens and children and weekends away. Death was my elusive lover, treasured and longed for and jealously guarded, and always distant. Always out of reach.

But a lot of water has passed under a lot of bridges now, and I don´t know if that is something I could do.

You think you know now, don't you? But you have no idea what it was like.

The strangest thing was that I felt it, I felt everything. Normally I feel nothing but itching, discomfort, tightness, soreness. The surface of my skin is dulled by scars, lots of it is numb -- nerve damage, apparently. When he touched me, I felt everything. It was like having new skin.

I might not have behaved the way I did. I might not have gotten drunk every night, slept around, done drugs, woken up in strange houses wondering where I was and what I'd done the night before.

The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species at that.

Yes,' he says. 'It's great. Very… quiet.' This makes her laugh. 'What about your job?' 'I need to make some new contacts up here, but yes –that's looking good.' 'What is it you do again?' There is a pause while he waits to turn into the car park and she thinks maybe he wasn't listening, but then he says, 'It's like a therapy business. Setting up franchises, that kind of thing. Facilitation.

He would let himself in whenever he felt like it, come and go as he pleased. I remembered when this was such a big deal for me, not so long ago. I'd wanted my own space, my front door that I could lock behind me and know for sure that nobody was going to be inside there without me. I remembered telling him that I wanted that space back. I remembered asking him for the key, and him walking away from me. I remembered him simply walking away and leaving, without so much as an argument.

If people stop looking at you, do you cease to exist? Does it mean you're not a person any more? Does it mean you're already dead?

I raised my wine glass to him and sipped a toast to the future, to what lay ahead.

There were times Flora wanted to slap her mother, hard. She went to make toast for everyone, not least to soak up the brandy. The plainclothes police officer who'd been assigned to them was leaning against the breakfast bar, fiddling with her mobile phone. "Would you like me to do that?" she asked, when Flora came in.

I lay back down, fitting myself into the curve of his body, pulling his arms around me, protecting me, keeping me sage.

Then for some reason I've not done it properly one day, and that's no good at all, because if you're going to do something that's for your own benefit, you've got to do it properly or there's no point.

As my English teacher used to tell me, if you can't think of the right thing to say, say nothing at all.

She can't quite bring herself to say more than that. And even when Jim had been alive and well, despite being happy and settled and everything else that came with a twenty-year marriage, it had been Aiden she'd thought about before falling asleep, Aiden she'd fantasised about when the mood took her.

You head back outside, leaving the door unlocked. Better get used to it, you tell yourself. One of the dogs barks as you walk across the yard towards the main house. It's an excellent warning, of course. You knock on the front door. 'You don't need to knock,' she says, opening the door. 'You can come straight in.

This isn't normal. This isn't how normal people think. Fuck off, world--what the hell is normal anyway?

I wasn't worried, but I thought I should know something that didn't seem to be there anymore. It was gone, whatever it was, fleeting and slippery like a fish darting through silky weeds. From

MR LEWIS Mr Brightman, would you have

On the Thursday I called an emergency locksmith and had the locks changed on the front door and the back door.

Yes." She had moved in for a fortnight in the summer, when Chris and Taryn had gone to France on holiday, to water the plants, keep an eye on things. "Well, come round whenever you like. I'll make the spare bed up later. And, Flora, it will be all right, okay? Everything will work out.