Anna Hope > Quotes

“And whatever anyone thinks or says, England didn't win this war. And Germany wouldn't have won it, either."

"What do you mean?"

"War wins." He says. "And it keeps winning, over and over again.”
― Anna Hope, Wake

“Life is still malleable and full of potential. The openings to the roads not taken have not yet sealed up. They still have time to become who they are going to be.”
― Anna Hope, Expectation

“I'll remember you, he thinks, and as the gun carriage, with its coffin and its dented helmet pass him by, he closes his eyes.

Nothing will bring them back. Not the words of comfortable men. Not the words of politicians. Or the platitudes of paid poets.”
― Anna Hope, Wake

“This, to Lissa, seems to be the main thing that university teaches you – how to bullshit convincingly. The better the university, the better the bullshit.”
― Anna Hope, Expectation

“She has stumbled through, has survived. Just.”
― Anna Hope, Expectation

“Unlike music, excessive reading has been shown to be dangerous for the female mind. It was taught in our earliest lectures: the male cells are essentially katabolic: active energetic; and female cells are anabolic: there to conserve energy and support life. While a little light reading is fine, breakdown follows when woman goes against her nature.”
― Anna Hope, The Ballroom

“She may not ever know. And this fact – the knowledge of his subjectivity, these experiences of his to which she will never have access – feels more violent, somehow, than the betrayal itself.”
― Anna Hope, Expectation

“How do you stand it?" she said.
"Stand what?"
"All... this." Ella threw out her arm. "Does it not make you mad?"
Clem glanced up. 'Much madness is divinest sense,' She said, and gave a small laugh. "There are plenty of mad women in here. I'm not sure I'm one of them though." She shrugged. "You'll get used to it.”
― Anna Hope, The Ballroom

“I think he thought no one would want to marry me because of the way I am".
"Why? What way are you?"
"Oh . All wrong", said Clem with a brief smile. "I'm all wrong".”
― Anna Hope, The Ballroom

“Later, Ella looked for the two swallows in the eaves outside the window, watching them even more closely now. The thought of them flying all that way, across mountains and seas and returning here, because this was their home - of them knowing how to find it - changed things. It was a new way of seeing; this was no longer just the place where women and men were kept, but the home of other creatures too, ones that had travelled far and still chosen it because this, above all other places, was the place to bring their families into the world.”
― Anna Hope, The Ballroom

“Her head hurts - from the alcohol, from her mother, from the sun. _We changed the world for you and what have you done with it?_ She knows what Sarah thinks. That she has wasted time - fumbled the baton in the intergenerational feminist relay. What she should have said - _Our best. We're just doing our fucking best._”
― Anna Hope, Expectation

“The big man bent to her ear. "You know you have to gamble, don't you, to get what you want? So what are you prepared to lose?”
― Anna Hope, The Ballroom

“Clem rubbed at her face with her cuff and gave a quick, rueful smile. 'It's just so sad. It's the umpteenth time I've read it, and I will always think it will have a different ending. But it never does.”
― Anna Hope

“The afternoon deepens. The light grows viscous.”
― Anna Hope, Expectation

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I want to torch it all.”
― Anna Hope, The Ballroom

“I am becoming pagan, Fraser wrote, that first winter. Here, in this muddy brown monotony, where blood’s the only colored thing. There is no God here, only the moon and the sky.
And so I have made a pact with the moon. On clear nights she will bring me to you.”
― Anna Hope, Wake

“They are stiff in an English way. Not like the Russians. The Russians are not stiff, not at all. They have vodka and grief and the blood of the land in their veins, and the English have weak tea and the damp.”
― Anna Hope, Expectation

“Her wants proliferate, metastasize inside her.”
― Anna Hope, Expectation

“She was beautiful, standing there in her petticoat and shawl. She fetched a cup for him and waited while he drank, her poise keeping time at her neck, her feet bare on the earth floor. He imagined her taking him inside the cottage, lying on the bed. Giving her pleasure in the darkness. Spilling things he had seen into her ear. How the beauty of life and the world struck him like a fever sometimes, but how it was all mixed up and mangled with the hate. But he said and did none of those things, only, when he had drunk down the milk, handed the cup back, thanked her, and walked on.”
― Anna Hope, The Ballroom

“I see so many women here,” she says, “and they are holding, all of them. Holding on to their sons or their lovers or their husbands, or their fathers, just as surely as they are holding on to the photographs that they keep or the fragments of childhood they bring with them and out on the table here.” She gestures with her hand. “They’re all different but all the same. All of them are afraid to let them go. And if we feel guilt, we find it even harder to release the dead. We keep them close to us; we guard them jealously. They were OURS. We want them to remain ours.” There’s a silence. “But they’re not ours,” she says. “And in a sense, they never were. They belong to themselves, only. Just as we belong to ourselves. And this is terrible in some ways, and in others...it might set us free.”
― Anna Hope, Wake

“Hannah estudia a estas personas y piensa: aquí, la vida está aquí. Como si desde el principio una parte de su interior hubiera estado entregada a la ardua tarea de crearse una piel, en medio de la oscuridad y del silencio, y ahora ya estuviera lista para lucirla, para entrar en la luz.”
― Anna Hope, Expectation

“Excessive reading has been shown to be dangerous for the female mind”
― Anna Hope, The Ballroom

“I see so many women here,” she says, “and they are holding, all of them. Holding on to their sons or their lovers or their husbands, or their fathers, just as surely as they are holding on to the photographs that they keep or the fragments of childhood they bring with them and out on the table here.” She gestures with her hand. “They’re all different but all the same. All of them are afraid to let them go. And I’d we feel guilt, we find it even harder to release the dead. We keep them close to us; we guard them jealously. They were OURS. We want them to remain ours.” There’s a silence. “But they’re not ours,” she says. “And I’m a sense, they never were. They belong to themselves, only. Just as we belong to ourselves. And this is terrible in some ways, and I’m others...it might set us free.”
― Anna Hope, Wake

“the town had been the arrival port for thousands of Yoeme people, deported from Sonora in the first years of the twentieth century, under the regime of Porfirio Díaz. People who had been forcibly removed from their homes and villages because of their resistance to the opening of their ancestral land — the largest, most fertile river valley in Mexico — to make way for Mexican and American venture capitalists.”
― Anna Hope, The White Rock

“They discuss whether discharge - with its pejorative connotations - is itself a patriarchal term. They decide that there are as many different types of vaginal abjects as Inuits have words for snow. They watch with satisfaction as the boys cringe. They feel a power. They become electric.”
― Anna Hope, Expectation

“War wins,” he says. “And it keeps on winning, over and over again.”
― Anna Hope, Wake

“the two young women discussed whether you should ever trust a man who liked Kerouac.
No. They decided. Definitely not. And then laughed together as though to say: surely that much is obvious?”
― Anna Hope, The White Rock

“Driving along the highway from the airport, they had passed mile upon mile of grain elevators, marking the most productive land in Mexico, but when they reached the place where Google Maps said the river should be, there was nothing but a dusty, toxic-looking trickle. The river — that great, fertile river that the first Spaniards had compared to the Nile — had been dammed long ago, diverted by a huge aqueduct to the factories in Hermosillo and Ciudad Obregón, and all that remained in the traditional villages was polluted, unsafe for irrigation or to drink.”
― Anna Hope, The White Rock

“Ne pas s'enfuir était une douleur dans tout son corps. Partir était une douleur pire encore. Et elle était piégée, tiraillée entre les deux.”
― Anna Hope, The Ballroom

“Vous n'êtes pas obligé de danser avec moi, lui dit-elle en reportant les yeux sur lui. Pas si vous n'en avez pas envie."
Mais en guise de réponse il se contenta de tendre les mains. Afin d'envelopper les siennes.”
― Anna Hope, The Ballroom