Casey > Casey's Quotes

“But then, what woman actually had her own name? Maddie’s “maiden” name was her mother’s married one.”
― Laura Lippman, Lady in the Lake

“But what if the girlfriend would not be silenced, what if she threatened to make a fuss? The status quo relied on women’s playing by the rules of a game they could never win.”
― Laura Lippman, Lady in the Lake

“She wondered what Ali looked like. She was going to either look exactly like Maddie or be as opposite as possible. Maddie would find it more flattering if he had chosen her opposite number. Another blue-eyed brunette would indicate that she was just a type, whereas a wispy blonde would suggest that he would never quite get over her, that she would be with him forever, sort of like chicken pox.”
― Laura Lippman, Lady in the Lake

“but I don’t think you have to be married to be a good Catholic. However, it is one of the seven sacraments, and . . . well, I think if you bother to go through with it, you should try and stick with it.’ ‘And if it’s too easy to get out of, who’d bother trying?’ she said. ‘In my day the worst thing you could imagine was being unmarried – you just went with the first fellow who asked you.”
― Alan Murrin, The Coast Road

“Oh, give me a break. It seems to me that some people are able to behave however they want and still go around like they haven’t a care in the world.”
― Alan Murrin, The Coast Road

“They’ll never be satisfied – shower of bastards.”
― Alan Murrin, The Coast Road

“The door’s open, you silly bitch.”
― Alan Murrin, The Coast Road

“I know what you need,’ she said. And for just a moment her husband looked like a little boy, as fear and confusion and panic passed across his face like shadows, and disappeared. She’d meant that what he needed was some woman to lie beneath him every night. But what he’d understood was that he needed a good beating from her father. Like the time early on in their marriage when Donal had pushed her and she fell and caught the corner of her eye on the mantelpiece. And when her father had seen the V-shaped cut near her temple she hadn’t even needed to explain anything. He’d simply waited with her in silence until Donal got home from work and as soon as he’d stepped out of his van her father had escorted him into the living room and shut the door. She’d heard Donal roar. He’d needed three days off work after that until his ribs healed. And he’d never touched her again.”
― Alan Murrin, The Coast Road

“I am pregnant,’ she wrote. ‘At forty-four years old I am pregnant.”
― Alan Murrin, The Coast Road

“Witch, witch, witch, she thought as she moved along the sand, the wind pulling loose strands of her hair. Witch, witch, witch. The mad woman in the cottage, the witch on the hill – she stole husbands and children.”
― Alan Murrin, The Coast Road

“Forty-five letters – I can only apologise. Could you burn them for me? I am embarrassed by the cliché I have become and I promise you this will be the last letter I write.”
― Alan Murrin, The Coast Road

“But I am beginning to think that it was in fact I who could have been anyone, that you were looking for an escape route, a life raft, something to be jettisoned once you had reached dry land.”
― Alan Murrin, The Coast Road

“His eyebrows were grey and wiry but his head of tight curls was jet black. He dyes his hair, she thought, and that made her trust him even less.”
― Alan Murrin, The Coast Road

“I called Mrs Frawley an old wagon,’ he shouted.”
― Alan Murrin, The Coast Road

“feelings don’t have to be mutual to be real.”
― Alice Feeney, Rock Paper Scissors

“The woman wore her bitterness like a badge; the kind of person who writes one-star book reviews.”
― Alice Feeney, Rock Paper Scissors

“Word of the year: atelophobia noun. The fear of not doing something right or the fear of not being good enough. An extreme anxiety of failure to achieve perfection.”
― Alice Feeney, Rock Paper Scissors

“If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.”
― Alice Feeney, Rock Paper Scissors

“redamancy noun. The act of loving the one who loves you; a love returned in full.”
― Alice Feeney, Rock Paper Scissors

“She parts my thighs to peer at my pipkin,”
― Tess Burnett, The Hanging of Hettie Gale

“And it is only then, with the crowd behind her and all her life before her, that she truly understands what she was meant to have known from the very beginning. He is not hers. He was never hers.”
― Anita Shreve, Fortune's Rocks

“and it seems, as it always does, a most elemental gesture, to take a child from a man.”
― Anita Shreve, Fortune's Rocks

“And it seems a most elemental gesture—to take a child from a man.”
― Anita Shreve, Fortune's Rocks

“(Are you squiffy?”
― Anita Shreve, The Fortune's Rocks Quartet: Fortune's Rocks, Sea Glass, The Pilot's Wife, Body Surfing

“Management has pared wages down to next to nothing, McDermott reads, and he thinks of fingernails scraping a cement wall as they go down. The bosses live in high style on the other side of the river. McDermott can see the massive houses from the mill yard — poor planning on someone’s part, he thinks. No hint of an economic depression over there. Not with all their power lawn mowers and swimming pools and fancy automobiles. In fact, it’s possible the bosses are doing better than ever now. Money goes farther these days: gardeners and cooks and chauffeurs come dirt cheap.”
― Anita Shreve, The Fortune's Rocks Quartet: Fortune's Rocks, Sea Glass, The Pilot's Wife, Body Surfing

“She had violent red hair and the clearest skin he has ever seen.”
― Anita Shreve, The Fortune's Rocks Quartet: Fortune's Rocks, Sea Glass, The Pilot's Wife, Body Surfing

“Let’s see if I’ve got this right. Capitalist owns textile company and makes huge amount of money and lives across the river in big house with Frigidaire and GE washing machine and Packard and Chris-Craft motor yacht while employing hundreds of workers to whom he pays pitiful wages, all the while thinking it perfectly normal that they should live in hideously filthy tenements with no running water and no indoor plumbing and not enough money to feed their children. How am I doing so far?”
― Anita Shreve, The Fortune's Rocks Quartet: Fortune's Rocks, Sea Glass, The Pilot's Wife, Body Surfing

“And then said capitalist decides for whatever reason,” Vivian continues, “— perhaps his business is not doing well, perhaps he wants a trip to Havana — to cut his workers’ pay ten percent so as to increase profits for himself. And, mirabile dictu, the workers mind!” Mironson says nothing, but Honora can see a small twitch at the side of his mouth. “Uppity workers,” Vivian says, exhaling a long plume of blue smoke.”
― Anita Shreve, The Fortune's Rocks Quartet: Fortune's Rocks, Sea Glass, The Pilot's Wife, Body Surfing

“The tension in the room reminds Honora of the aftermath of a thunderclap: full of sound and yet intensely silent.”
― Anita Shreve, The Fortune's Rocks Quartet: Fortune's Rocks, Sea Glass, The Pilot's Wife, Body Surfing

“Of course, he is a handsome man, but there is something a bit . . . well . . . oily about him that is somewhat off-putting, at least to Vivian. He seems too eager to please, yet hardly to notice when Honora is in the room.”
― Anita Shreve, The Fortune's Rocks Quartet: Fortune's Rocks, Sea Glass, The Pilot's Wife, Body Surfing