The Nets Quotes

“For the true horror of dictatorship lies not in the dramatic cruelties but in the daily erosion of the individual will to make decisions and accept responsibility.”
― Sheelagh Kanelli, The Nets

“The days passed. This truism has a particular truth of its own when one day seems to refuse to let the other days come, pulls each day back stickily into itself, so that finally you wonder if ever there will be a large enough space of time between you and that day.”
― Sheelagh Kanelli, The Nets

“So frightful was her grief, so imprisoning – like a wall over which her would-be rescuers were too tired and weak to climb, too small – that nobody could tell her that the crowd still waited for the last and most terrible return.”
― Sheelagh Kanelli, The Nets

“Now the nets lay round the boat cut and broken, the children trapped in them free, but too late for their freedom.”
― Sheelagh Kanelli, The Nets

“Ah! He was a good man. A warrior when young. Now he has gone to the Underworld.' As she spoke, she began to rock back and forth, wailing, as was expected of her. When the woman had wailed enough she would stop. Thus was sorrow measured. At a funeral, people would watch the widow and comment to each other: 'See how she cries. She must have loved him.' Or if the widow was cold and frozen in her private grief, the tongues would say, 'Not one tear did she shed. She can't have loved him.' Privacy and the individual act were unknown to these people, so bound, lest perhaps they fall.”
― Sheelagh Kanelli, The Nets

“Childhood, Anna thought, is a crystal ball circling around sometimes this way, sometimes that, its facets occasionally flashing with radiance; gleaming with grey lustre; or black. Childhood is not a straight line, so you cannot say: in this year I was a child and in that year I was not. To treat it, or indeed anything, as a series, is somehow to falsify.”
― Sheelagh Kanelli, The Nets

“She just had to stand and stare for a moment at the wonder of the wide water, see all the colours – glass green, song blue, secret purple – blending into the sky, falling into the sun.”
― Sheelagh Kanelli, The Nets

“She would come back some other time, she thought, on some other holiday away from her inland home pressed round by the mountains, where there was no horizon, where she lived out her childhood, restricted by restricted people, by lessons and the endless ticking of the clock. One day she would come back to this happy, glittering thing.”
― Sheelagh Kanelli, The Nets