“There are a thousand places to hide a child in London, even a remarkable child. And if she is remarkable there are a thousand buyers waiting . . .”
“The island disappeared inside a dark pall of smoke and debris, lit by fires churning underneath. Apprehension grew inside them.”
“Science is a story. History is a story. These are the stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves come true.”
“He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed 'Truth! Truth! Truth!' we have no choice left but confess - he was a woman.”
“In middle age I wholly lost my way and found myself within an evil wood far from the right straight road we all should tread”
“I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.”
“The message had been carried through the dawn chorus and into the cold pink morning. Effie Truelove was going to die on Friday.”
“A perfect fusillade of single answering tones came from seal after seal, travelling rapidly northward, until at the further end of the reef it ceased.”
“humans are mysterious, even to themselves, and it is this mystery that keeps them going. It is the mystery that makes love possible.”
“I could never run fast enough or far enough. Robby was inside me. Wherever he was, running for his life, he carried part of me with him.”
“There was no need of lock, of door, of wall: this was a prison whose bars were ten thousand miles of water.”
“Behind every great woman is a man who tried to stop her.”
“It was a chain of stories clinging to stories, of love clinging to love. It was an inheritance he did not know how to pass on.”
“I imagined he was the type of boy who wondered about things, as I did, who broke his heart wondering about things...”
“We have reached a time where each of us must rise to the challenges that confront us. It is time for us to change.”
“Life will become more pleasant and comfortable if we get rid of some of the abundance.”
“Memory and forgetting: these are the faculties of mind by which we are aware of time, and time is a mystery”
Rupert Everett performance
“If I had my life to live over again, I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death.”
Colin Firth introduces The People Speak
Watch Catherine Chanter talking about her debut novel The Well