158 Quotes by Lily King

I sat next to a woman called Tadi and I asked her what she would do with the shells she earned and she said her husband would use them to buy another wife. ‘I cannot make this bag fast enough,’ she said. We all fell over laughing.

Because death is not tragic to them, not in the way it is to us,’ I said. ‘They mourn.’ ‘They feel sorrow, great sorrow. But it isn’t tragic.’ ‘No, it isn’t. They know their ancestors have a plan for them. There’s no sense that it was wrong. Tragedy is based on this sense that there’s been a terrible mistake, isn’t it?

When my mother died, I sort of felt her inside me sometimes,’ I say. ‘Like I’d swallowed her.’ He laughs. ‘Swallowed her.’ ‘I still have moments when I feel that, when it feels like she’s inside me, and there’s no difference between us or that the difference doesn’t matter.

It was only a button. It was only a bit of thread. From a wrinkled blue dress I had once undone.

All the people she was missing, the tribes she would never know and words she would never hear, the worry that they might right now be passing the one people she was meant to study, a people whose genius she would unlock, and who would unlock hers, a people who had a way of life that made sense to her.

I think back on all the rooms in all the cities and towns where I wrote the pieces of this book, all the doubt and days of failure but also that knot of stubbornness that’s still inside me.

Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?

I look back on those days and it feels gluttonous, all that time and love and life ahead, no bees in my body and my mother on the other end of the line.

He kissed where I was touching, just below my collarbone, in that place where all my feelings got caught. I believed she’d sent him to me as a gift to help me through.