Quotes from Sonya Hartnett

You're not supposed to have iron bars around you - no one is supposed to have that. You're supposed to fall down hills and get lonely, and find your own food and get wet when it rains. That's what happens when you're alive.

No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can't answer anything except 'I cannot'.

My life was pouring out my feet and seeping through cracks in the floor; yet still I knelt and did not move, for fear she'd let go my hands. Let me stay, I wanted to beg: Please don't make me go.

I suppose that's what happens when you make other people's lives miserable: life gets miserable back at you.

How can you know love, and lose it, and go on living without it, and not feel the loss forever?" "You can't," Feather answered. "You feel the loss forever. But you put it in a corner of yourself, and bit by bit some of your sorrow changes into joy. And that's how you go on living.

It is scary, sometimes, Tomas admitted. But the scary bits are what make you brave.

There's fire in my fingers. I burn everything I touch.

She despised the sadness that hung inside her like old lace.

I would always be lonely, but no more alone.

Justin is twenty-four years old: the world will never be more suited to him than it is now, he will never feel more embraced by life or have greater faith in his right to exist. The earth and the oxygen, the cities and lights, the nights and the beaches seem created for him and for those like him.

On the evening of her eighteenth birthday, Maddy opened her journal and made a list of the jewels and precious stones she'd held. Gold, diamond, emerald; ruby, turquoise, pearl; amber, jade, marble… There were some she had forgotten. Beneath these she listed what she thought were the most perfect tastes and smells. Coffee, cinnamon, peaches; vanilla, honey, basil; baking bread, fresh bread, toasting bread.

Time crawled past on leaden hands and knees.

Though she'd try to do otherwise, she had never been able to stop cluttering her present with her past. Now somebody she didn't know would pack her treasures into plastic bags and carry them away. A life, at its end, is a pile of cloth and paper, and goods that can be bagged and labelled. None of the best things - the voice and the laugh, the tilt of the head, the things seen and felt and spoken - are allowed to stay behind.

Watching, she had felt unusually and keenly alive, alive the way a knife is sharp, so that the humiliation she was enduring was perfect, like the paring of skin from a hard apple.

I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of a cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

Yeah, reflections! The same, but different. Like twins - like blood brothers! And when you need something bad done, like punishment or revenge, you'll just ask me, and I will do it -

I looked along the aisle and saw her, and it was as if I saw her for the first time. Everything changed. The ancient featureless interior of me spangled orange, mint, cat-blue. I looked back to the window immediately, my face damp, my breath caught. And worried I would never have the courage to look at her again.

Every atom in me feels composed of lead. This is what dying is: a pull to the ground.

it's stupid to be that way, so easily hurt; it's better to be like a plank of wood, an emotional mule. It's best not to feel,...best to have your nerve endings cauterized.

And she's striken with sudden nostalgia for the life she's been so eager to pack away, she wishes there was some way of being everything at once–grown and sure and clever, young and protected and new.

We both knew that what I said was the truth, as well as being a lie. The pure and honest answer was pinging between us, hovering above the weeds.

Some things about him are the same as ever. He still looks painfully angelic.

You always underestimated me. You thought you made me harmless when you gave angelhood to me. You forgot that some angels are warriors. Where there's warriors, there's war. I will fight to the death. It's my duty. I am not afraid.

Andrej thought about it - the notion that the world was riddled with holes where certain people and animals were meant to be, but weren't.