The Names Quotes

“Because sometimes their need to please previous generations is greater than their need to love future ones.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“Mehri has always treated parenting like she’s cooking a big warming pan of something: a pinch of that, a pinch of this, she’s sure it will turn out fine in the end. Cora’s own approach has always felt more like baking a cake: carefully measuring out ingredients and trying not to ruin everything. She admires Mehri’s way.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“Sometimes he is benign, sometimes stern, almost maleficent. A word so close to magnificent, she thinks, sent off-course by maleness.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“She catches snippets of what they’re saying: how dogs don’t need to live as long as humans, they’re simply so good at finding the joy in life. As if we are put on this earth to extract a certain amount of happiness and can leave once the job is done.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“That maybe freedom is just about choosing the life you want. Even if that life’s in one place, doing the food shop together. Arguing over who forgot to buy loo roll.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“And Cora realizes her daughter has learned what to do. How to soothe, to placate. That just through watching, the first time she’s stepped into this role, she is already accomplished. If it doesn’t stop, Cora thinks, this pattern will repeat unendingly, the destiny of each generation set on the same course.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“She's been given a life, but she has somehow failed to spend it.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“There’s something about that—when the quietest person, most reserved in their opinions, most reluctant to impose their thoughts on others, finally speaks; you hear. Oh. Oh, and you’re suddenly face to face with the truth.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“She's 68 now, and although she knows the idea of being put out to pasture is a phrase others associate with obsolescence and redundancy, for her it conjures lushes green fields filled with buttercups where she's free to roam.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“He was not his father. He'd thought he walked a narrow line, at any moment ready to tip into likeness. But the line wasn't narrow after all. It was a great, uncrossable chasm.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“And which would be better? To have those days boiled down into one intense burst of color, or to have the pin removed from the thorax every now and then, dusty wings fluttering back to life, a little more time eked out before being locked away again?”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“they are already absorbed in a conversation that will continue to slowly unspool across all the years they have left.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“There was a subtle power in bowing out.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“She suspects that, to be a good parent, she must pack away the mothering part of herself into a box and gently close the lid on it. She had not realised this is what would be required of her, had not seen it coming. And yet she will do so willingly. Would you lay down your life for your child? the world silently asks. Yes, she’s done this. But she hadn’t known there would be a second reckoning, where this would eventually mean laying down the arms of motherhood: caution, foreseeing, checking, reminding, nurturing, openly caring.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“That feeling of being read to, of being wrapped up in her voice, those words, whatever place the story had taken us to. It sounds stupid, but it was like a magic carpet.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“How she lived for them, and because of them. And in spite of everything.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“something she once said about contempt being the most corrosive thing in a relationship, the indicator of a marriage on the rocks. He felt it. The crashing carnage of jagged words on damp air; hostile bodies that no longer turned towards one another. And he couldn’t see what he needed to do to change it,”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“Do you not see that calling our son Gordon might mean he ends up like you? But she couldn't. Because surely that was the point.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“Yes, people's lives bump and collide and we send one another spinning off in different directions. But that 's life. It's not unique to you. We each make our own choices.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“She suspects that, to be a good parent, she must pack away the mothering part of herself into a box and gently close the lid on it.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“Cora wants to say it matters because sometimes big men feel small inside.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“I just want them to be happy. Or content, at least.” “Are you?” “Am I?” “Content?” he says. “Me?” She laughs, surprised by the frankness of his question. “I don’t know that I’ve stopped to think about it.” They sit in silence as the water spills down the guttering outside. “I feel,” she says finally, “as though I have a purpose. And I guess there’s a contentment in that. Of knowing who I am, what I’m meant to be doing on this earth.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“He kneels beside her, does the things we instinctively do: lowers an ear to her lips; checks her wrist for a pulse. But it only confirms what he already knows. He brings her still-warm hand to his cheek and weeps. Because they have not had long enough. Because he is not ready for their shared life to be at it's end.

He sits with her as the light fades, as the chill starts to creep in through the open door, as her cooling body sets in place. He sits with her through the night, not ready to move on to the next phase he knows must come. One of phone calls and condolences. And her absence. For now, for just a little while longer, it will be just the two of them.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“So, she must seek to diminish her own presence in Bear’s mind, make space for others to move into the foreground. What will be left of her then? she wonders,”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“Only while I’m still in bed. That doesn’t mean I don’t get something out of it once I’m there. It’s not even really the religion bit. It just warms you, the familiar faces, feeling a part of something. And the incense too. It smells like home. Safe, you know? And you sit there in the quiet, listening, and you get to thinking about something you’ve been wrestling with. And I don’t know if it’s those big high ceilings that just spirit it away—the blessed space—but when I leave, I always feel lighter. Ready to go into the week.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“His daughter not meeting his eye. The wails of his infant son. And this is the truth of it. The people he was meant to love, he has only hurt. He cries out then, a guttural sound. Because it’s so clear. He had one life. And he could have spent it differently. He will not find peace; his final realization is too fresh, too stark, to be smoothed away. But still, he snatches at a moment, plucks it from the air. A time when he could have set them on separate paths.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“She wonders again if she is doing this right. Any of it, all of it. If it’s even the right thing for Gordon himself to be carrying on this tradition. Maybe consenting to live in the shadow of his father and his father’s father is only perpetuating the likeness, increasing the weight of it for him. Perhaps calling their child something different would be a liberation. Not at first, but later.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“That maybe freedom is just about choosing the life you want. Even if that life’s in one place”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“Who’s going to get covered in Mummy’s love?” and then spreading out her fingers”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“Orla’s version of religion always makes sense to Julian. But then he thinks of the Fathers”
― Florence Knapp, The Names