25 Quotes by Susie Steiner

You take up yoga, walk and swim. And nothing works. The outlook’s grim.

Thinking how she loved the very flesh of her. You got used to that with children, love crashing over you like waves.

The baby’s tiny fat hand lies on Manon’s other breast, possessively. Recently, he’s begun pulling off – rather painfully taking the nipple with him in his powerful suction-gums – in order to look up at her and smile. Huge gummy mouth, froglike, eyes filled with delight. It’s as if he is saying thank you for the milk, or something along the lines of “Isn’t this nice, we two?

The problem of food, for one: it symbolizes everything. She wants delicious morsels, yet cooking for herself is so defeating: a surplus of ingredients, the washing-up unshared, and the sense that it doesn’t matter – the production of it or whether it’s nice.

Plant prickly bushes under windows. Halt! This is a shrubbery!

She’s alone so much these days, in part because when the sand drifts receded, along with the departure of the children, they left an excess of time, while Ian’s existence maintained its steady course, which was essentially Rushing About Being Important.

I am of an age for grief.

Tea had featured heavily in the past fortnight. Miriam sometimes felt her belly sloshing with it, like a waterbed, yet still she took tea when it was proffered, for the symbolism, she supposed – solicitude, comfort, warmth. It is the English way, after all.

One minute you are loved, and then you are not.