My Phantom Husband Quotes

“The street seen backwards was like an invasion by the sea on the night of a flood. What I saw resembled an inside-out glove, the negative of a street. I was walking over the ocean bed, creeping along the walls, the corroded gateways, the mossy leprosy of cars, octopus-infested gardens, pines encrusted with vampire shells (sap drained, suppliant branches forming reefs); to navigate anywhere beyond this housing estate you'd have needed to be familiar with the shadows of the labyrinth, hearing the helm scraping the rooftops, the keel grating against the gutter rails. But my step was light, steady and brisk.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, My Phantom Husband

“The world was evaporating under the sun and I was floating. The town was evolving according to the laws of some sublime chemical reaction in which matter went from solid to gas, avoiding the liquid stage, peeling off gradually as layers of mist.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, My Phantom Husband

“It wasn't night, it was simply darkness, with me in the middle hoping all the while that time was carrying on flowing, that something would crop up, me all alone in the middle, with my veins and my muscles dissolving rapidly into nothingness, me made of molecules of flesh and thought, dispersing in a cloud (a process of expansion as sudden as that of the room, a nebula of bedroom and me, between limits that grew dimmer by the moment).”
― Marie Darrieussecq, My Phantom Husband

“There are times when you wake at dawn and check your neck for the marks of the vampire, those two little red dots, your pupils still contracted with hate, muscles weary from the struggle.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, My Phantom Husband

“Over the following days and weeks I would come to see, with mounting weariness, that this was to be the pattern of my life from now on: marginal and grim; my habitual daydreams and memories of our life as a couple reduced to nothing, to stuttering salvoes, by the gunpowder of the simple physical truth of my husband's absence.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, My Phantom Husband

“My husband's disappeared. He got in from work, propped his briefcase against the wall and asked me if I'd bought any bread. It must have been around half past seven.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, My Phantom Husband