16 Quotes by Claire Fuller

Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.

Flora would have liked to ask her parents why the words ‘to father’ have such a different meaning from the words ‘to mother’.

May your bones be washed by the saltwater, your spirit return to the sand and the love we have for you be forever around us.

In the middle, the river was a deep green, scattered with rocks poking their noses up for a breath. The water charged around them, creating eddies and whirlpools. Closer to the bank, the current dragged lengths of weed along with it so it seemed that long-haired women swam just under the surface, never coming up for air.

The all-seeing eye. What has it seen? Nothing as interesting as the things I saw through the judas hole at Lyntons. But of course, the difference is privacy. The other women will complain and shout about being looked at without warning. But I think it is better to know when someone is watching rather than to live your life under an invisible gaze.

Beautiful on the surface, but look a little closer and everything is decaying, rotting, falling apart.

It’s about believing two opposing ideas in your head at the same time: hope and grief.

Her story would have been simply memory and imagination without me to hear it; undiscovered and unaired, like a book without a reader. My second role was from the wings: the prompter.

Fiction is about readers. Without readers there is no point in books, and therefore they are as important as the author, perhaps more important.