Quotes from Gwendoline Riley

He lies down next to me. He says, 'You know - you have a face to die for/' 'Well, don't die,' I say, "we just met.

Writing to you like this is the same as saying your name when I've woken up late, feeling sick, tasting rot. It's pointless, but it happens.

I don't think it ever ocurred to me to aim for happyness, though. I mean, do you do that? No, just try to get trough with as little pain as possible, that's the way ...

She was learning something important: how to live within the sound of her own slow breathing, how to love the view when her eyes were shut.

I thought that whoever she really was wasn't who she was living as.

Very intimate but very separate at the same time'. That's my credo for friendship.

It's all about vanity, isn't it? I think it says something about people if they can't do it

He says,'Why is it love, Esther? Why call it that?' 'Because. Why is what you do art? Because you say so.

I think they're being cheap with their lives, that's why. So they seem ravenous for the worst thoughts I can have.

If only i could get that under control then i feel like i could stay here a long time, watching the days leaking into the nights, swilling over the buildings, bleeding back again. I could lie and not think of anything but ways to describe the sky, the clouds, the light.

He was twenty-eight then. I was twenty. What followed was strange. An attachment? A conviction? I make no case for it, either way. Or only this case: that it was based on nothing and fed on nothing. For the next three years we saw each other for a few days a year, that was all. Wet English winters. Black rooms above pubs... Rather he looked dull, resentful. His eyes in shadow; dark slots.

Certainly I remember feeling that it was his dream world, his symbol world, that we were dragged into during those first arguments, and it frightened me, being given--as I saw it--the part of a training dummy, outfitted in colours, slogans, that I could not see.

Michael, there in front of me. Each expression of helpless submission or bored compliance. This was him. How he passed. And living like that, of course, you would now and then end up with fiancees which had to be shaken off.

Have I ever been as frightened as when I read that? Frightened of myself, I mean. Ashamed of how I worked. In my panic I started to reply. A letter amounting to, *Please don't cut me out.* I didn't send it. I felt afraid of my words, then, of that machine. I left Manchester soon afterwards. I moved out while Margaret was away; didn't stay to say goodbye as we'd planned. I just dropped the key in her letterbox and went. Befitting what I was.

He stared at me for a couple of seconds, then picked up his cutlery, hunched over his plate. Outside, behind him, the wind carried the rain, the lamp posts quivered. I found myself thinking of certain people I knew--people not that far away--how surprised they'd be (wouldn't they?) to see me sitting there with that bright, bland expression on my face, trying to fence with this nonsense. Or had I been very naive? Was this what life was like, really, and everyone knew it but me?

Finding out what you already know. Repeatingly. That's not sane, is it? And while he might have said that this was how he was, for me it continued to be frightening, panic-making, to hear the low, pleading sounds I'd started making, whenever he was sharp with me. This wasn't how I spoke. (Except it was.) This wasn't me, this crawling, cautious creature. (Except it was.)... none of this was personal.

My voice got dull. I spoke like a machine that was running down, while he seemed only to gain energy.

Can the future be a white expanse? Can you run in, heart pounding? I find I've never given much thought to the future. Beyond that sense of getting away. Derelictions, you see, left and right. Yet here I am.

My father died of the same thing that Edwyn had suffered... Was I too stupid--I couldn't be--to take a lesson from that? Could I trust myself? Not to make my life a lair.

How do I know what's coming? I always do know. Something around the eyes.

It's true about the running water. You can hear anything you want to in it.

I don't know what I'm playing at. I feel so romantic and furious all the time.

Damn it, I'm angry now. I do believe life is loss, I do, but my suffering-to-words-ratio was out of control: lying around composing nothing but these - righteous arias, month after month, these tawdry special pleas.

What they prefer to that is to find someone to have power over; someone to own and to bully, to smash and to waste. She wondered if she would ever be in love.