Quotes from Jon McGregor

It was something, he was sure, he would be capable of tearing flesh from bone to defend.

It made me feel primitive, rooted, connected to the dirt of the earth and the light of the stars, a spun thread pulled across the span of generations.

And in the attic, if she had managed to find her way up the steep and crumbling steps, she would have found the one room left open to the light, she would have stood, breathless, picking cobwebs from her fingers and her face, staring at a whole meadow of wildflowers and grasses, poppies and oxeyes and flowering coriander, all flourishing in bird droppings and all lunging pointedly towards the one square foot of available sky.

There was a volume to what was not being said.

I remembered the promises we'd made to each other, me and Sarah and Simon, and I wondered if I'd been naive to think we could keep them.

The nettles and cow parsley came up in swathes, the bindweed trumpeting through the hedges

The only sounds were footsteps and dogs barking along the road and faintly a helicopter from the reservoirs.

In the first week they were seen setting off from the visitor centre with their father leading the way, returning an hour later in the sort of glowering silence that follows a difference of views.

There are so many people in the world, and I want to know them all but I don't even know my next-door neighbor's name.