The Night in Question Quotes

“We don’t leave the children we were. We simply grow around them like a tree will, in the end, grow around a bicycle that’s been left against them—”
― Susan Fletcher, The Night in Question

“Florrie studies him. From her lower viewpoint, she sees his pores and wrinkles, and a thumbprint on one of his lenses. There is, too, a nick of a razor near his bottom lip- and it reminds her once more that this elderly gent is still a boy, in some ways, as she is still a girl, fashioning a trumpet out of a rolled-up newspaper or chasing Bobs down the garden. She’s still blowing out ten birthday candles. We don’t leave the children we were. We simply grow around them like a tree will, in the end, grow around a bicycle that’s been left against them.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Night in Question

“We think, for so long, that old age will never find us. We feel that we, as individuals, might somehow be exempt from it, that we might be given some sort of ticket that allows us to sidestep death, as one might a manhole cover, and carry on, whistling a tune. And then, one day, we find that our knees crack as we descend a staircase or someone offers us a seat on a tube train or we catch sight of ourselves in a shop window and think, Good God, that can't be me- so that we realize that no, we aren't exempt.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Night in Question

“Florrie learned, long ago, that society forgets an old person was ever young.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Night in Question

“.. they discussed what they wanted from this life- this brief, single dance in the sunlight of life. "Adventures," she told him... "I've always wanted them." from the moment that Bobs drew the world with his finger on the kitchen tabletop, this had been truth.
"Not to be married with children? Don't most women want that?"
"Not me," she replied. "Not these days.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Night in Question

“We don’t leave the children we were. We simply grow around them like a tree will, in the end, grow around a bicycle that’s been left against them—and Florrie pleases herself with this comparison.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Night in Question

“So walk into your life. Do what you want to do, Florrie, always – because a timid, obedient woman is quite the tragedy… Life. What a shame we only get one shot at it.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Night in Question

“… how on earth had it come to this; how was she looking at care homes for the elderly when she still felt twenty years old inside, still believed she could do headstands, and when there was still so much that she wanted to do with her life – like swim the English Channel or ride across plains with proper cowboys, learn the trumpet or walk the Camino de Santiago with all her belongings on her back. How might she do these things now? Where had the time gone? What was left of her one, brief life?”
― Susan Fletcher, The Night in Question