8 Quotes by Diana Evans

C'est incroyable ce que la musique peut charpenter une vie, toute une vie, et te la rendre par pans entiers, alors que tu pensais avoir tout oublié.

For home had a way of shifting, of changing shape and temperature. Home was homeless. It could exist anywhere, because its only substance was familiarity. If it was broken by long journeys or tornadoes it emerged again, reinvented itself with new decor, new idiosyncrasies of morning, noon and dusk, and old routines.

Where is the fault? Is it believing that the people you love are immortal? Untouchable? No, everyone believes that. Only no one know it’s what they believe- until it happens. Then comes the rage, the banging about the walls, crying what if, what if. Everyone is always so damned surprised, that is the horror of it.

It wasn’t you, you know,’ Michael said in the end. ‘That wasn’t the reason. You were just a device in the machine of our breaking, and we needed to break. It’s not so bad, when it finally happens. You think the world is going to collapse around you but it doesn’t. You can see yourself clearly again. You realise that the fear was the worst thing.

Before the children,’ Alice said, nodding her head slowly. ‘Children change everything. Family change everything. You must cross the river, to the other side of yourself. After that you find it.

As for Bessi, she spent her first human month in an incubator, with wires in her chest, limbs straggling and pleading like a beetle on its back. The incubator had a lot to answer for.

This is where you come when you are lost, when you feel that you are never going to find the place. You go to the first place, the first country, to her net curtains and her singular food, to her safe and open door. You lie down. You eat. You listen to her. And you know that this house will not fall down. This house is sturdy and is made of bricks, and the wolf will not come and blow it down.

The greatest challenge of life is to not die before we die.