Gold Quotes

“Her life was one endless loop that she raced around, with steep banked curves so she could never change or slow down. It just delivered her back to herself, over and over and over.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“Off the bike she was like a smoker without cigarettes, never sure what to do with her hands. As soon as she got off the bike, her heart was expected to perform all these baffling secondary functions like loving someone and feeling something and belonging somewhere - when all she'd ever trained it to do was pump blood.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“He really had experienced every tiniest increment of time in the four decades since then, and yet here he was surprised to be suddenly old and crippled. Turned out the rope didn't care if you noticed every daisy on the path to the gallows.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“LIFE is a big word, isn't it? Let's break it down into small segments. Let's find a level of granularity we can plan around; we could say we'll take it a month at a time, or a week at a time, and treat each of those modules almost as training units.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“The idea that Sophie could die had always been there, ever since the first diagnosis, and yet it seemed like a bad place on a map, an Ivory Coast, somewhere not urgently frightening because fear itself kept you away from the place. You thought of it as somewhere braver people went, or at least as somewhere you'd have plenty of time to pack your bags for.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“Every bitter joule of rage had been converted into speed. She was empty. There was no pain. The air whistled past her ears. She listened intently. That silent music was all there was. It was the sound of the universe showing her mercy.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“The smile came out like a newborn foal – its legs buckled immediately.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“You could only be sad if you let yourself join the dots, if you allowed the scatter of moments in their totality to have some kind of a downward trend that you might be dumb enough to extrapolate.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“It was a patient business, talking comets down to the speed of life.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“Oh, you know. The lingering sensation that in pursuit of my own exacting goals and objectives I might not have been as generous in spirit as I could have been with regard to the needs and dreams of the people I cared most about or for whom I was emotionally responsible.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“He felt good for once, he really did. Maybe the deal was that life had to break your body down before you could see it. Maybe there wasn’t any other racket in town except this one that brought you to your nadir and challenged you to build yourself back up from it, then showed you that what you’d done at least meant something to someone.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“Citius, Altius, Fortius”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“The planet was filling up with good-looking young worldlings built entirely of opposites, canceling themselves out and- speaking as a bloke- leaving nothing you'd honestly want to go for a drink with. This new species of guys paired city shoes with backwoods beards. They played in bands but they worked in offices. They hated the rich but they bought lottery tickets, they laughed at comedies about the shittiness of lives that were based quite pointedly on their own, and worst of all they were so endlessly bloody gossipy. Every single thing they did, from unboxing a phone through to sleeping with his athlese, they had this compulsion to stick it online and see what everyone else thought. Their lives were a howling vacuum that sucked in attention. He didn't see how Zoe could ever find love with this new breed of men with cyclonic souls that sucked like Dysons and never needed their bag changed in order to keep on and on sucking.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“Just beyond your sight, life might be moving in ways that were moments away from being revealed to you.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“Maybe he was overreacting....Somehow you were meant to take responsibility, minute to minute, for deciding which events you would call manageable, now that none of them were.”
― chris cleave, Gold

“He reached out a hand behind the headrest of his seat and Kate took it, and they squeezed. The pressure created a fixed point in time, to which so many accelerating events could be anchored.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“But the door …'
Tom grinned. ‘Was only ever in your mind.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold