The House of Lost Secrets Quotes

“When you’re still a child yourself, you can’t know that there will be value in these photos one day, that they will be the prompts necessary to remember. When you are still a child, you don’t yet know that you will forget some things and misremember others.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“You’re in the shadow of a loss right now,’ Poll says, one hand on mine. ‘But you will learn to live with it.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“the pockets of my mind, out of habit, are stocked with moments to share with her later.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“Grief likes Wednesdays and bus queues, a hijack in the most unlikely of situations. Grief likes to be close, and friends for years.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“laughed like a drain”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“I was too young then to know that being silent is the same thing as being complicit.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“people used to believe we went mad with the full moon – hence lunatics.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“The average man – pretty ugly, bit chubby, dumb-AF – how many times a day do you think he thinks about his weight? Or how many calories in his coffee? Even while he’s wolf-whistling out of the window, or offering diet advice, or brushing by a colleague’s bum when he needs to get past her – do you think he’s thinking about his belly fat or his droopy arse?”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“Pray like you’d write a letter. Write a letter like you pray.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“Marry in haste, repent at leisure,”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“Ben says that grief doesn’t only have to be for death, that you can grieve something you’ve never had, grieve the negative space of it. Accepting that has helped me to add my mother, my teenage years, to these ghosts I live with – as much a part of me as all my best points. Each a part of what made me. I didn’t lose my mother to death: I lost her to difference. To a difference in the way we perceived the world, to a difference in what mattered, in where we would find our happiness.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“Permanent happiness is not a normal human condition,”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“Permanent happiness is not a normal human condition,’ he says.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“And I understood that, how you can live in a house your whole life but never feel like you belong. Never feel like these are your people, like you understand them.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“The corridors of my teenage years are going to be exorcised spaces, safe to walk in without poltergeist or ghoul or attack from the shadows.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“And all the time she was killing herself, a slow suicide while she wished for someone to notice, for someone to stop her.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“I don’t tell her that I was trying to bake myself a family, to fill a painful house with the smells of other people’s childhoods.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“There is a hollowness inside me, a change – a before and an after. The person I was with her and the person I am without her.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“Grief is longer and heavier than this. Grief likes Wednesdays and bus queues, a hijack in the most unlikely of situations. Grief likes to be close, and friends for years.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“And it gives me comfort that that’s how she spent her last day – believing that her life had opened up in front of her again, that it was all for her and she could do anything.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“When you lose a baby, you don’t process – immediately – that you’ve lost so much more than that: you’ve lost a child, an adult, their children. It’s not until you see your other child grow and develop and become their own person that you really start to understand what was lost.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“My granny talks about ‘tonics’ – anything or anyone that improves your life is a tonic: a holiday, or a friend or seeing a wee dog in the park. My granny has been a tonic for me.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“There are particular ones that a lot of alcoholics wear: strong, alcohol-based scents. Calvin Klein is one. When you smell booze, they’ll lift their wrist, show you that it’s the perfume. Had me for years.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“We’re very different people, he and I, neither of us wrong, neither of us bothering anyone else with our lifestyle choices, but very different people.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“And do you believe in that?’ ‘The power of collective consciousness?’ he asks. ‘If you like. The power of prayer.’ I think of my mother’s unhappiness. All the prayer in the world didn’t help her, didn’t shore her up. ‘I think it’s all we have,’ Ben says, and he pats the trunk of the tree like”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“Sudden death is a bomb exploding above you, blindingly bright and showering you with its fragments every time you close your eyes. My thoughts are still shocked, ringing with white noise and scattering around in panic.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“With every mile, I shed stress like flakes of skin, as if the journey were whittling me clean.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“foods.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets

“peace that comes from a lifetime of shared experience, of understanding the things that made us.”
― Anstey Harris, The House of Lost Secrets