Joseph Knox > Quotes

“I watched [her] from the window, my hand pressing hard into the glass. There should be a word for it. That phantom limb, reaching out from your chest, towards things you’ll never have. She crossed the road with wide, lovely strides, and I always wonder what she went on to. The last shred of sunlight caught her hair when she turned the corner, like the start of one thing and the end of another. The dusk itself. I never saw her again.”
― Joseph Knox, Sirens

“There should be a word for it. That phantom limb, reaching out from your chest, towards things you’ll never have.”
― Joseph knox, Sirens

“The pavements were blocks of ice under my feet, and I could feel the cold through the soles of my shoes. I thought about the past ... The terrifying blackouts of my youth. I thought about never seeing my sister again. I thought about [girl]. First scared, then alone, then dead.”
― Joseph Knox, Sirens

“... she was impossible not to look at, impossible not to love. She moved through the party like an aura, and even the places she’d been and gone from held something of her radiance, her afterglow.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“Organized, optimistic people, taking trips. Reluctant, frazzled travellers, following work or family on to the next place. Stiff-limbed rough sleepers trying to look respectable enough to use the toilets, where they’d wash up as much as possible before being moved along. The endless ebb and flow of a major city. And unmistakable in the throng, all of the lovers running away.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“I waited for my face to warp and alter in the glass but it didn’t change. It had finally settled on a look and, after months of doubt and confusion, I suddenly recognized myself so well. I was my father’s son. The violent man I thought I was pretending to be.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“The missing missing were people who dropped off the face of the earth and kept on going, with no one in their lives who noticed, or no one in their lives who cared. When they were found dead, with no means of identification, it was almost as though they’d been born that way.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“a security uniform, crumpled on the floor, like he’d evaporated while wearing it.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“He looked like a stage of evolution we’d had to go through to reach humanity.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“could see the moon in a grubby window, slicing through the sky like a scythe.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“Now, I can believe Professor Michael Anderson might lead a much more interesting life than us, that he has thousands of teenage girls batting their eyes at him all day, but who’d forget something like that?”
― Joseph Knox, True Crime Story

“And if you could close it without swallowing the city’s entire speed supply, we’d all be grateful.’ He grinned again. ‘Leave some for the rest of us, eh?’ 4 Parrs had me dropped back at the hospital, exactly where I’d been picked up.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“She acted like she had post-partum depression before she got pregnant, so you can imagine what she was like after. I just couldn’t believe how disappointed she seemed to have this tiny miracle, Louisa, in our lives all of a sudden. That’s why I initiated the divorce.”
― Joseph Knox, True Crime Story

“severing ties with old friends that I’d yet to rebind.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“She just had this gift, this voice that felt like it had the power to change the course of someone’s day. It was like she gave the unspoken some physical presence. I think if she’d been allowed to reach her full potential, her voice could have changed the course of whole lives.”
― Joseph Knox, True Crime Story

“One benefit of quitting speed, cocaine and ecstasy was that it made drinking feel like a health choice.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“To be a doormat to some older man, and to isolate herself from anyone who saw things differently. Without all that in her head, without where it eventually led her, would we even be sitting here?”
― Joseph Knox, True Crime Story

“But Zoe, my best friend in the world, is still missing all these years later, and this is what Kimberly wants to talk about? It’s nothing, it’s a footnote.”
― Joseph Knox, True Crime Story

“I crossed the road to the home of the neighbour I’d spoken with the previous day. I needed a curtain twitcher.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“It’s funny to think that in all my protestations that Zoe and I had nothing in common, I was overlooking our two recent suicide attempts. Well, not funny ha-ha …”
― Joseph Knox, True Crime Story

“Before you were born,’ she said wearily. ‘Do you remember?’ The boy didn’t move. ‘Well, death’s like that. One minute you are and the next minute you’re not. Everything goes black.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“their fists wrapped around pint glasses of piss-yellow lager.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“The FT doesn’t tend to lead with missing blondes. I myself find stories of that kind quite grisly, and I really was incredibly busy.”
― Joseph Knox, True Crime Story

“The longer I stayed, the more I realized she’d been talking about the tower, that place. There was something wrong with it.”
― Joseph Knox, True Crime Story

“All I saw was a room full of people who’d betrayed my daughter and betrayed me. I said I should burn the place down for all the good it had done.”
― Joseph Knox, True Crime Story

“I must say, I personally find it difficult to stomach this story of hardened sex traffickers releasing a young woman because she had a bad knee. I think men of that stripe are usually preoccupied with other parts of the anatomy.”
― Joseph Knox, True Crime Story

“the gin blossoms, blooming in his cheeks.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“Because of the light he’d flicked on, that split second he’d held down the switch, he couldn’t see in the dark any more. Instead, a neon imprint of the open-throated woman was burned into his retina, like the first seconds following a camera flash.”
― Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man

“I’m sorry, but that’s when my Virgo comes out. You know, if pushed I can be critical, clinical, precise. I’m not saying anything radical here. Women shouldn’t have to put up with this shit.”
― Joseph Knox, True Crime Story