Quotes from Ashley Hay

Such fascinating things, libraries. She closes her eyes. She could walk inside and step into a murder, a love story, a complete account of somebody else's life, or mutiny on the high seas. Such potential; such adventure—there's a shimmer of malfeasance in trying other ways of being.

That is marriage , he thought, remaking yourself in someone else's image. And who knew where the truth of it began or would end?

The oceans and the skies…and the sun coming up each new day. That's all there is, I think. That's all that matters to think on.

There's some comfort in seeing things go on; birds keep singing, buses keep running. But if you want those things to continue, perhaps you have to accept that the other kinds of things, unhappier, even horrific ones, will continue too. And that's harder.

They'd had a long chat, Elsie Gormley and this house, more than sixty years of it. It had witnessed all her tempers, all her moods, and usually improved them. It held her voice, her husband's, her children's, and now their children's in turn - echoes and repetitions lodged in around the baseboards, around the window frames like those pale motes of dust that had wedged at the edge of the kitchen floor.

All the things they'd brought into this house; all of Elsie's things, packed up and taken away. A world delineated by this ebb and flow of items. The stuff of people's lives.

How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line—how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined—well, a good poem.

That line in Shakespeare, you know: 'there was a star danced, and under that was I born,' " she'd once told him. "That's the only Shakespeare I remember from school.

For his first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.

Houses could feel so different when you had them to yourself.

He was never able, really, to see things other than the way they were, he believed, and he took some pride in that.

I will say this once," her mother said. "You can put your foot down about this. You can have your tantrum. But get used to the fact that you're going to be a mother - and no matter how much you've been in control of all the other parts of your life, you're about to enter into a thing that you can never control entirely. Ever.

Because color meant life - humans, or animals, or plants, with their different petals, their changeable leaves, the way their chlorophyll pulsed bright and vital with the warmth of the sun.

Is that what it feels like, coming here? Like a crazy decision that took you away and made you some lesser version of yourself?

I just think it's funny the way my brain tries to make sense of strange places by imagining its people are familiar.

Some girl once read me a poem," Ben said after a while, as the kettle sang, "about all the things we can remember from all the other lives we've had, for forty days after we're born. 'Some great forty-day daydream," he pulled the line from the crevasses of his memory, and he wasn't sure how, "before we bury the maps.' Maybe it's not forty days; maybe it's all your dreams in childhood, bits of memory you can't decipher because they belong to a person you no longer are....

He felt the room's walls solid around him. This house, his wife, his kids: that was what defined him. He sought no purchase on the world beyond these things.

He had loved her without question and he had loved her without pause; she was certain of that. He had thought the best of her always; he'd brought her the one life sh'd wanted. Who would she be now, she wondered, without him? Who was Elsie Gormley if Clem Gormley's idea of her was no longer alive?

When she was small and at home on a rare sick day, she'd never quite trusted that her classroom would be there, with the day and its lessons going on, if she wasn't. "Solipsism": nine letters. Of course Ben had known the word.....It was how the rest of the world felt sometimes now that she was someone's mum. As if almost everywhere and everything else had disappeared. Sometimes, that wasn't so bad.

So this is parenthood, he thought. You behave better than you might for the sake of your kid.

Time lapse photography, Nan," she'd said. "You compress time - take a single shot every couple of minutes, and then run it together like film." She had another project that showed dresses being made, the fabric seeming to leap through the stages from cutting to sewing to fitting to catwalk in less than a minute....That was what life felt like now.

So she shifted her gaze inside the night-sky dome of her mind and watched different parts of her life pass by. Through a window she watched people dance. She watched a tram move along a street. She watched a painter mix her colors. And the night spun into day and the rest of the time still to come......It wasn't so bad, she supposed. She'd just lie here, quite quietly, and wait.....Maybe this was how she'd finally get home.

Maybe everyone had that one thing that would tempt them—in her case, the sight of an artist's arm rising and falling as it brought a new version of her into being. And if you caught sight of that, in the right place at the right time, then some new bubble of possibility opened out, and some extraordinary thing unfolded.

Sleeps through the washes of the morning's colors and the warm brilliance of sunrise. She sleeps in a world where she remembers, perfectly, every detail about her husband, this day, that sentence, another touch. She will remember it all in the deepest sleep, and lose it again the moment her eyes open and she wonders how late it must be for the sun to already be so high and then remembers, in the next instant, what happened the day before.