Quotes from Emily Barr

I am really here. Yet I know I am not. I am inside something that must be buried in my head. I am layers deep in my own brain.

Don't panic, because everything is probably all right, and it it's not, panicking will make it worse.

I want to see how I can exist by myself. I want to be allowed to live inside my memory.

The inside of my head is out of control. It is on fire. It is snowing. It is a wild jungle. It is an Arctic wilderness. It is everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will happen, all at once.

Time is a random thing. It is the thing that makes us older. Humans use it to organize the world. They have invented a system to try to make order from randomness. The other humans, all of them but me, live their lives by hours and minutes and days and seconds, but those things are nothing. The universe would laugh at our attempts to organize it, if it could be bothered to notice them. Time is the thing that makes our bodies shrivel and decay. That is why people are scared of it.

I have woken up inside one of my own memories. I am really here, yet I know I am not.

Although I don't know much about anything, I know that I have a story. I know that it is not over. There are shades and shadows of adventures and people and wild new places. Whatever Paris might turn out to be, and whatever Dr. Epstein is able to do, I want to be there to find out.

I want to look after her. I cannot begin to look after her: she looks after me and that's how we work.

Have you seen this cat?

Last time we went to the Ferryboat, I looked around at the families of upmarket beachgoers, at their healthy children expertly peeling prawns and drinking organic lemonade, and I tried to tell myself that everyone has sadnesses, that some of the adults would be hideously miserable in their marriages, that people would be having affairs and drinking too much and addicted to gambling, that lives would be on the verge of falling apart, families breaking up, businesses going bankrupt.

That, right now, is enough.

There is nothing in the universe but this. I smile. I do not talk to people. I just breathe and stare and exist.

She has to live, but I pull her towards death.

I put a row of toys on the bed. A brown-haired Barbie doll, then a Lego ambulance...then a gray Buckbeak the Hippogriff.

my face: I should have had a single tear frozen to my cheek

You would have been happy with a wife who adored you, not someone who clung on to you like a life raft on a stormy sea and then wished she could cast you aside and move on when she reached land.

I was just a tiny part of a huge universe, and nothing really mattered. Every single thing was temporary, and one day all of us would be gone without trace. It was an intensely soothing thought.

I would rather be single. I cannot possibly say that.

I have never really been able to separate a good instinct from a self-destructive urge)

want to scream, and sometimes I do. On occasion, I scream as loudly as I can

and he has never been anything worse to me than incredibly, cringingly annoying. I married the wrong man, with an inkling at the time that that was what I was doing, and so it is my fault and I am stuck.

apron, a cheap appropriation of the Cath Kidston effect. I feel like an interloper in someone else's life. I am a creature from science fiction, wearing an earth body to disguise my true self.

This, once almost an endearing habit, is now an affectation that drives me to the brink of homicide.

I am married to a man who calls a phone charger 'the pluggy-in thing', and the remote control 'the buttony thing for the telly'.