Meg Rosoff > Quotes

“I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“I was dying, of course, but then we all are. Every day, in perfect increments, I was dying of loss.
The only help for my condition, then as now, is that I refused to let go of what I loved. I wrote everything down, at first in choppy fragments; a sentence here, a few words there, it was the most I could handle at the time. Later I wrote more, my grief muffled but not eased by the passage of time.
When I go back over my writing now I can barely read it. The happiness is the worst. Some days I can't bring myself to remember. But I will not relinquish a single detail of the past. What remains of my life depends on what happened six years ago.
In my brain, in my limbs, in my dreams, it is still happening.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“I am almost a hundred years old; waiting for the end, and thinking about the beginning.

There are things I need to tell you, but would you listen if I told you how quickly time passes?

I know you are unable to imagine this.

Nevertheless, I can tell you that you will awake someday to find that your life has rushed by at a speed at once impossible and cruel. The most intense moments will seem to have occurred only yesterday and nothing will have erased the pain and pleasure, the impossible intensity of love and its dog-leaping happiness, the bleak blackness of passions unrequited, or unexpressed, or unresolved.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was: A Novel

“Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“The things that break your heart when you think there`s nothing left to break”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“The facts of his existence are plain. I know that he will never silence those unspeakable voices. He heard how people killed, and how they died and their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him. He didn't know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself. You could see that from the scars on him.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“I didn't seem to have that effect on anyone but it would have been a waste for both of us to be saints.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was: A Novel

“I felt a momentary urge to leap into the sea and swim free of the present. ”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was: A Novel

“On the warm stone walls, climbing roses were just coming into bloom and great twisted branches of honeysuckle and clematis wrestled each other as they tumbled up and over the top of the wall. Against another wall were white apple blossoms on branches cut into sharp crucifixes and forced to lie flat against the stone. Below, the huge frilled lips of giant tulips in shades of white and cream nodded in their beds. They were almost finished now, spread open too far, splayed, exposing obscene black centers. I've never had my own garden but I suddenly recognized something in the tangle of this one that wasn't beauty. Passion, maybe. And something else. Rage. ”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“After all this time, I know exactly where I belong.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“I can't even trust my own imaginary dog. How much lower can a person get?”
― Meg Rosoff

“Perhaps the way to succeed is to think of life on Earth as a colossal joke, a creation of such immense stupidity that the only way to live is to laugh until you think your heart will break.”
― Meg Rosoff, There is No Dog

“I give thanks for all that has passed, for all that is passing, and for all that is yet to come.”
― Meg Rosoff

“She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.'
'Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?”
― Meg Rosoff, The Bride's Farewell

“Fate is trying to kill me. I miss my dog. What's a doctor going to say? You're not ill, you're mad as a muffin? They'll either lock me up or tell me to get a grip and no one will believe the truth anyway.”
― Meg Rosoff, Just in Case

“I'm sorry I started all this by trying to fly and I'd take it back if I could but I can't, so please think of it from my point of view: if you die I will have a dead brother and it will be me instead of you who suffers.
Justin thought of his brother on that warm summer day, standing up on the windowsill holding both their futures, light and changeable as air, in his outstretched arms.
Of course, Justin thought, I'm part of his fate just as he's part of mine. I hadn't considered it from his point of view. Or from the point of view of the universe, either. It's just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second. A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and my brother in Luton thinks he can fly.
The child nodded. A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.”
― Meg Rosoff, Just in Case

“After all this time, I know exactly where I belong. Here. With Edmond. And that's how I live now.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“I guess the difference between Gin and me is that when Gin got shut in the barn she thought Edmond didn't love her anymore but because I could feel Edmond out there somewhere always loving me I didn't have to howl all night.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“It's not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle. ”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was: A Novel

“If there was ever a more perfect day in the history of time it isn't one I've heard about.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“At the time, I didn't have the insight to wonder at the transient nature of despair, but now that I'm older I've seen how little it takes to turn a person's life around for better or worse. An event will do, or an Idea. Another person. An idea of a person. ”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was: A Novel

“Osbert was the only one who didn't seem suspicious. He was so interested in the Decline of Western Civilization that he missed the version of it taking place under his nose.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“Such a courageous boy I was. To act brazenly under scrutiny and risk further injury to my wounded heart. Ah, the resilience, the blind, dumb persistence of youth. ”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was: A Novel

“I'm a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore. Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was: A Novel

“Ask any comedian, tennis player, chef. Timing is everything.”
― Meg Rosoff, Just in Case

“Somewhere along the line I'd lost the will not to eat.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“Every war has turning points and every person too.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“And after awhile of this my brain and my body and every single inch of me that was alive was flooded with the feeling that I was starving, starving for Edmond.

And what a coincidence, that was the feeling I loved best in the world.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“I love you. I'm madly in love with you. Well, madly obviously, given I'm mad as a mudlark. But you saved my life. I'd be dead without you. And you're so good to me. And you love me too. How lucky is that? Amazing! Amazingly lucky. I can't live without you. You're my lucky charm."
She felt a sudden desire to kill Justin's well-meaning friend.”
― Meg Rosoff, Just in Case

“It was not a big smile, not particularly bold or polite or ironic or glib, not asking for anything or offering anything, not stringy or careless, not, in short, like any smile I had ever experienced before. But such a smile! You could burn a hole in the world with that smile.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was: A Novel

“Time erodes us all.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was: A Novel

“When a creature begins to emerge from it's chrysails there is a point at which it is neither one thing nor the other, not quite grown into a new identity nor rid of the old one.
It's wings are folded and sticky, it's colours hidden. Whether it will emerge in shades of emerald and lapis lazuli or the colour of mud is yet to be revealed.
It is that long, still, moment of waiting that fascinates me utterly. The suspence of waiting for beauty to unfurl.”
― Meg Rosoff, Just in Case

“She accepted the permission bestowed by passion to live entirely in the present.”
― Meg Rosoff, The Bride's Farewell

“Where's your dog?" Peter's voice came from within the gushing stream of water. Justin thought he must have misheard.
"Pardon?"
"Your dog."
"Yes?"
"Isn't he with you today?" Justin looked at Peter.
"Ha bloody ha." Peter stuck his head out of the stream of water, features dripping. He smiled shyly.
"I love greyhounds." Justin stared.
"My dog is imaginary."
"Oh." Peter looked interested. "That's unusual." Justin put his head under the water. When he emerged, Peter was still looking at him.
"Less work," Peter offered, cheerily. "If the dog's imaginary, I mean. Not so much grooming, feeding, et cetera.”
― Meg Rosoff, Just in Case

“I frightened myself. I became the ghost Piper was so scared of.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“This was what happiness felt like - this wondrous, miraculous alternative to dread.”
― Meg Rosoff, There is No Dog

“As it was, nothing happened except the two of us watching the sea come in and go out again, listening to the birds, sheltering from the rain when it came, and lying silent as the sky changed from blue to white to gold. For hours we lay side by side, breathing softly together, watching thin rivulets of water run down the cliffs and into the sea, feeling the world slowly revolve around us as we leaned into each other for warmth--and for something else, something I couldn't quite name, something glorious, frightening, and unforgettable.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was: A Novel

“It's a strange sensation to live inside another person's life, to wonder all the time what he is doing, or thinking or feeling.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was: A Novel

“It might go down better than appearing as a giant reptile encased in a ball of fire and forcing yourself on her.'

'WHY DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BRING THAT UP?”
― Meg Rosoff, There is No Dog

“The featureless trundle of my existence began to change. At the time, I didn't have the insight to wonder at the transient nature of despair, but now that I'm older I've seen how little it takes to turn a person's life around for better or worse. An event will do, or an idea. Another person. An idea of a person ”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was: A Novel

“I was pretty far gone, but not so far gone that I thought anyone with half a toehold in reality would think what we were doing was a good idea.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“it was love, of course, though I didn't know it then and Finn was both its subject and object. He accepted love instinctively, without responsibility or conditions, like a wild thing glimpsed through trees. ”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was: A Novel

“Incessantly, it seemed, life plagued her with responsibilities, made her fall in love, ripped away any consolation she might find. Sisters and parents, brothers and horses… All staked their claim on her, each conspiring to weigh down her soul… Every day brought unwanted connections, losses, and complications that broke her heart.”
― Meg Rosoff, The Bride's Farewell

“The open road. What a trio of words. What a vision of blue sky and untouched hills and narrow trails heading God knew where and being free—free and hungry, free and cold, free and wet, free and lost. Who could mourn such conditions, faced with the alternative?”
― Meg Rosoff, The Bride's Farewell

“Pouring breakfast cereal into a bowl, he saw his life crashing down in smoking ruins.”
― Meg Rosoff, Just in Case

“There he lay spooked, a spinning wheel in a celestial bowling alley.”
― Meg Rosoff, Just in Case

“The boy squirmed, long skinny legs wrapped round each other, rib-cage twisted ninety degrees from his hips in what appeared to be an impossible configuration of limbs. His elbows jutted out abruptly from his sides like some sort of drafting error and (independently aware of their awkwardness) his arms wound themselves round his torso like vines.”
― Meg Rosoff, There is No Dog

“Mona wasn't listening. Of course a bet was a bet, she thought. And there was her reputation to consider. Not to mention her safety. Particularly her safety. For she was frightened of Emoto Hed, who had something of a reputation for creative cruelty where unpaid debts were concerned. People disappeared, leaving behind nothing but very long, very piercing screams. Mona imagined that forever could become incredibly tedious when passed in a state of constantly accelerating agony.”
― Meg Rosoff, There is No Dog

“Would it really be better, he wanted to ask, if it were always this nice? Would anyone bother to notice? Or would they simply pass through a night like this, unmoved?

And (this was more to the point) if life were without flaws and no one ever changed or died, what role would God have?

A muffled sound of voices reached him. Above, the stars glittered so large and bright, he thought he might throw a net and pull them towards him like whiting. Boats slid past him in the inky dark but failed to enter his thoughts.”
― Meg Rosoff, There is No Dog