The Ghost's Child Quotes

“Love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night; it is one of those things in life that is truly worth knowing.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“Nothing was easy, and sometimes she failed, and sometimes she thought that the fairy stories were right, that there must indeed be easier ways of living happily ever after; but defeat is a poor ending to any tale, so she kept trying.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“I want my life to be mystifying," she declared, although she didn't know what she meant.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“She had witnessed the world's most beautiful things, and allowed herself to grow old and unlovely. She had felt the heat of a leviathan's roar, and the warmth within a cat's paw. She had conversed with the wind and had wiped soldier's tears. She had made people see, she'd seen herself in the sea. Butterflies had landed on her wrists, she had planted trees. She had loved, and let love go. So she smiled.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“There is nothing that is more beautiful than everything else in the world.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“How can you know love, and lose it, and go on living without it, and not feel the loss forever?"

"You can't," Feather answered. "You feel the loss forever. But you put it in a corner of yourself, and bit by bit some of your sorrow changes into joy. And that's how you go on living.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“She despised the sadness that hung inside her like old lace.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“On the evening of her eighteenth birthday, Maddy opened her journal and made a list of the jewels and precious stones she'd held. Gold, diamond, emerald; ruby, turquoise, pearl; amber, jade, marble… There were some she had forgotten. Beneath these she listed what she thought were the most perfect tastes and smells. Coffee, cinnamon, peaches; vanilla, honey, basil; baking bread, fresh bread, toasting bread.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“A life, at its end, is a pile of cloth and paper, and goods that can be bagged and labelled. None of the best things - the voice and the laugh, the tilt of the head, the things seen and felt and spoken -are allowed to stay behind.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child