5 Quotes by Rebecca Stott

It's only when you've pieced together a story in several different ways that you realise where the holes are, discover the knowledge that is still missing, the questions you still need to ask.

On July 29, six days after I had arrived in Paris, Fin and I moved into the new lodgings on the top floor of the hotel next door, where, beyond the pigeons who occupied the window ledge, you could see the turrets of Notre Dame. The concierge told us not to feed the birds, but we gave them our stale bread just the same, and so our flock became a feathered multitude, pushing and shoving one another behind the cracked glass. In the afternoons the light seemed to have feathers in it.

Paris is an ocean," a lawyer called Honoré said to me in a bar on the place Vendôme later that night. We were very drunk. "You can take as many soundings as you like, but you'll never reach the bottom of it. You can survey it, draw it, describe it. But, however thorough you are, however careful and scrupulous, something is always just beyond your reach. There will always be another unmapped cave, monsters, pearls, things undreamt of, overlooked by everyone else.

I didn’t like crab. Not at all. My stepmother had tricked my into eating a crab sandwich once in a cafe in Cromer, told me it was tuna. I’d never forgiven her.

Stepping into the smell of a long-abandoned aple crop, Cameron called towards the house, hoping to catch his mother’s attention in the window where she would be sitting working.