9 Quotes by Jess Kidd

It’s the hottest April in living and dead memory. So hot that the crows are flying with their tongues hanging out of their heads.

Stories, particularly the bad ones, are told in their own time.

She's put him out like a cat a million times, but like a cat he has a habit of slinking back and curling up into the warm corners of her mind.

It is the smell of a million mould-blossomed pages, of a thousand decaying bindings, of a universe of dead words.

For this is their parting: as sudden and slow, surprising and foreseen as any parting. Between together and apart: an eyeblink and all of eternity.

For the dead are always close by in a life like Mahony's. The dead are drawn to the confused and the unwritten, the damaged and the fractured, to those with big cracks and gaps in their tales, which the dead just yearn to fill. For the dead have secondhand stories to share with you, if you'd only let them get a foot in the door.

My sister said that when the tide was out you could walk all the way to America; the waves pulled back that far. So far that the starfish forgot there ever was an ocean and stiffened with dismay. So far that the seaweed wept itself dry on the rocks with nostalgia.

Memory is like a wayward dog. Sometimes it drops the ball and sometimes it brings it, and sometimes it doesn’t bring a ball at all; it brings a shoe.

The raven turns in her element and the world turns too, confirming what she already knew: she is the centre of everything.