113 Quotes by Sarah Hall

To be comfortable inside one’s sadness is not valueless. This too will pass. All things tend towards transience, mutability. It is in such mindful moments, when everything is both held and released, that revelation comes.

So, tell me. Was it fear that stopped you? Fear of reprisal? Fear of what else they might do to you? Sister, how bad does a situation have to be before a woman will strike out, not in defence, but because something is, as you say, worth fighting for?

I’ll tell you this, lad: A tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it than it can do of the man who’s got it on his back.

Life is not straightforward: relationships bifurcate; there is nothing more complicated, more confounding, than love.

The truth of death is a peculiar thing. For when they leave us the beloved are as if they never were. They vanish from this earth and vanish from the air. What remains are moors and mountains, the solid world upon which we find ourselves, and in which we reign. We are the wolves. We are the lions.

There is always half a truth in cliche.

All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It’s the law of paternal disenchantments.

Blue that was unstable and misbehaved when left in skin. Blue like the sea that had taken his father. Blue, for his mother’s sake, and for the true colour of every bereaved and bloodless heart when it is collapsing.

First law of an argument: those who remain reasonable will make others seem unreasonable.