Sally Piper > Quotes

“Grace studied her hands as they moved across the meat. They looked much like any others the same age - veined, lined, the backs stained with tea-coloured spots. But they'd felt their way through the past seventy years in unique ways. Much of their work had been to the benefit of others, some not. She'd known them as still, listening hands, but also as hands that moved with urgency and madness. For a while they'd been careful nurse's hands. Then hands that cradled three babies and clapped, tickled and taught in turn. She'd bruised, burnt and cut them; some scars suggested badly. They'd dismissed, beckoned, pleaded over the years, and not always successfully. Their goodbyes were too many to recall.”
― Sally Piper, Grace's Table

“Families were like sand dunes, Grace decided. They shifted shape and position with even the gentlest of forces. Even a tiny puff – a shrug – could bring about change, move a handful of thoughts to a new understanding, a new authority. A gale, like today’s, and whole dunes – lives and futures – were relocated, reimagined. From Grace's Table”
― Sally Piper

“Grace saw Susan’s restaurant meal as one consumed out of duty: a family brought together on the condition of convenience and ease; the time-frame predetermined by the restaurant’s hours or next bookings; the menu at someone else’s discretion, their tastes, their preferences. Not a beating heart anywhere, Grace thought. And no blue ribbon moments, except the opening a wallet.”
― Sally Piper, Grace's Table