Quotes from Sarah Hall

It is its absence which defines the importance of a thing.

You can't quite catch sight of yourself as you go about your life, that's all. Your body doesn't contain its spirit, just as the mirror has relinquished your portrait. You are elsewhere

And only further into relationships when you knew the person better, and their place in your life became clear, if there was love, if there was hate, if there was deepness of any kind, only then did you understand that the embers of meaning had been present all along and glowing since that first moment you laid eyes on them. As if you already knew them before you came to know them. As if some rift had bent time.

People here don't care about the countryside in any deep way, she says. They just want nice walks, nice views, and a tearoom. That

Lipstick never lasted long when they were together; he would always kiss her after she had applied it, as if he liked the smearing viscous sensation. Sometimes she felt sure it was discomposing her that he enjoyed.

You are comprised of a million tiny locks. There's no master key to be found, encased in the plush velvet heart, no matter how desperately you ask someone to reach in and grope around. No matter how hard you try to find it.

Red, brown, yellow, green, black. Five colours to say everything that could be said. And what Cy suddenly wanted, more than anything in the world just then, what he wanted was that missing blue, primary and resistant to the trade. Blue that was unstable and misbehaved when left in skin. Blue like the sea that had taken his father. Blue, for his mother's sake, and for the true colour of every bereaved and bloodless heart when it is collapsing.

These were the moments that defined the city. They were the waking dreams of a never sleeping metropolis.

There are men who make the world seem populated by good men, those who are intuitive, or have been taught.

a tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it than it can do of the man who's got it on his back.

We endorse the manmade competition between ourselves that disunites us, striping us of our true ability. We don't believe we can govern better, and until we believe this, we never will. It's time for a new society.

Prescient experts of biological codes.

Freedom comes with responsibility; it comes with privilege and a conscience. It comes with difficult choices. We cannot stand by and allow the Authority to do what it is doing any more. We cannot wait for them to come and take apart what we've made. I will not allow it. You know me. I will not allow it.

Life conspires to plant us in the funniest of gardens where the trees need an especial form of tending

Like a dog defeated in a frenzied circle by its own tail and slowing and realizing then that the tail it was after all along was already its possession

A month in and it seemed to CY that he was an explorer summiting the foothill of an a bizarre and primitive island.

You look at your face in the mirror. You wonder if you'll ever be able to use your body again for more than basic living.

If she had been created on a philosophical specimen dish then her genetic beliefs had been altered to make her more resilient and assured of herself, more companionable to her own kind. She had not been exposed to a world of inferiority or cattiness, nor male dominance.

Tattooing was unto itself its very own art form, old as the hills and stranger than time. Whether in rich, far-flung resorts or condemned cottages, glamorous prestige or ragged poverty, human hearts and souls were variable and would always require painting.

My mother had this phrase. You've heard me say it in the spring whenever it's too warm. These are borrowed days. And they'll have to be paid back later in the year. I think that's what we've had up here.

I did not contact my father. He had another family; he was a stranger. I'd been raised, capably and neglectfully, by a borrowed woman and her shadow. I lay on Naomi's bed in the empty cottage, comforted by the hollow in her pillow, my face soaked. It was the beginning of grief, for every version of her.

You didn't understand what he was saying, until he kissed you. It was a kiss of such complicity, of such uncomplicated sympathy, that you felt for the first time not alone in your suffering.

Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power.

I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious.