Bring the House Down Quotes

“Now I hold my life in my hands and feel its warmth. I breathe gently on the embers. I make them glow.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down

“I did watch one of Hayley shows online and I was upset by it to be honest. It brought back a lot of things from when we were together and when we split up, but I found hard to process at the time and I think I’m only now realizing the effect they all had on me. I’ve been seeing a new therapist who said that all addiction stems from an inability to face your own emotions. It’s helped me to understand my relationship with drinking after what happened, but it also made me think about you. I wonder what you might not be facing. I don’t want to presume. The time for us to have these conversations is actually over now and I don’t want to open up that whole thing again, but I wanted to reply to you because all this has made me feel as though there was maybe a door that was still open somewhere and for the record I’d like it to be shut. It’s hard to put it into words. Thething that happened and how it felt I still don’t know really why you didn’t come with me that day. What some of these other women in your life have been saying about you scares me Alex. It makes me worry that you might not be capable of caring about anyone. That’s terrifying and it’s not the Alex that I thought I knew for three years. ... I have a lot of regrets about that time the thing that really hurts about it, even now though is that I am actually grateful it happened. I’m relieved it showed me I didn’t have to be tied to you by something neither of us wanted. I’m glad even if I had to pay for that release mechanism with pain and loss and guilt. I’m doing really well now I didn’t feel as though I needed to be part of some show.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down

“Sometimes I feel like a comic book superhero heroine whose origin story involved sexual assault as a female power could only ever be conferred through male harm, you know, I always hated those movies. I can’t reconcile these two ways of thinking about all this. It’s like two lint spark when I rub them together. On the one hand, there’s the memory of how I felt with Alex before any of this happened. I felt like he got me. You know, I felt held, but then there’s a humiliation of that morning and the feeling that any worth or talent I ever had was snatched away from me and that what I believed just a few hours before had been a trick.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down

“Nobody ever built a statue of a critic. Did they?”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down

“It wasn’t as I’d imagined any possible romantic future with Alex. I’m not an idiot. I wasn’t heartbroken. It was just that all our frank late night conversations about some of the most raw moments in his life had seemed to lead us here. There was more. To Alex I was a writer, I was not someone grieving or mothering or otherwise to be pity. I thought he would recognize this the warmth of it. I pressed my fist into my abdomen as far as it would go, the guilt haven’t hit yet, there was no room for it... There was only one slideshow of self-pity thinking about how alone I was, cut off from the younger person I’d almost become again, the girl I’d almost got back for a second there, for a one night only reprisal of my old self, a few glimmering moments of emotional mirage. A bud had bloomed in the darkness of my head, and then reality saw it, smiled and plucked it out.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down

“She was quick to laugh. I’ve seen in the interviews, and when she did, she leaned forwards in a way that both mocked you and included you. She was without obvious class markers in a way that I now realized I found baffling, which immediately made me ashamed of how often I must assign these markers to other people. There was a looseness to her, a messiness and a drive of chaotic focus that I think if I were being flipped, I might call the American dream.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down

“Being with Milo‘s family filled up something in Alex that he hadn’t previously felt as an emptiness, but now he knew the emptiness was there and had to find the edges to it. It became impossible to ignore. In time, separately, the teenage Alex discovered that sex offered a similar sense of peace, a sense of acceptance. Yes, it was a version of performance too. The physical sensations were all real, but the emotions, well that depended, that was part of the appeal. He remained almost equally obsessed with arguments and with sex because for Alex, the thrill of a strongly held opinion well expressed was physical, and by the time he was 16 he’d learned that when he was experiencing anything that temporarily focused his body and mind down to a set of neurological responses, sex arguments, cigarettes, drugs that was when he felt he finally got close to knowing who he really was.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down

“I wanted to see some places I hadn’t been to for years, to inhabit them again as the person I was now.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down

“To everyone whose work I've ever reviewed: thank you for making something worth talking about.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down

“Josh, too, looked different. His jaw was set wider than I remembered. Maybe I was just too used to seeing him only on video calls, and the reality of Josh in three dimensions upset the connections in my brain.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down: A Novel

“And journalism is full of shame. Before AI transcription software was invented, transcribing my interviews used to take hours, because I spent most of the time having to pause the tape to claw at my face in embarrassment. Oh, my poorly phrased questions, my laughter in the wrong places, my miss of an obvious opportunity for a follow-up, my rudeness, my nerves, my clear lack of knowledge of the subject, my stupid voice! But sometimes, when I was listening back, a moment would glimmer that I hadn’t noticed when I was in the room. A moment when maybe I’d held back from a question, out of a desire to be nice, and the interviewee had responded by giving me more than I’d asked for. They would volunteer some story, some frustration or inspiration, that would expose slightly more of the person than they’d intended to reveal. Any interview is a transaction, but people can’t help being people. Sometimes a connection happens without either of you realising it.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down: A Novel

“Never go back to the places you felt safe as a child,” he said. “You realise how unsafe you really were. But then, maybe it’s irresistible.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down: A Novel

“And then we’d had Arlo. And even though we’d planned for him to be there, when it happened, everything became a lot more complicated than I’d thought it would be. The escape path was overgrown and lost.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down: A Novel

“Sex once is a mistake, but twice with the same person, with a distance of time in between, is an affair. I hadn’t crystallised the difference before, but when I was confronted with it, I knew it instantly and instinctively. After the second time, he said Coralie hadn’t contacted him again, and Josh had avoided her as much as possible.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down: A Novel

“But how is that different from any other relationship that doesn’t work out?” Alex stared down the road in the direction the drag queens had gone, in the direction of the Sainsbury’s where Hayley had bought the gin. The lights from the pub on the corner were brightening as the night deepened. “Every break-up happens because the other person gradually realises that you were awful all along. The only difference is that she discovered I’m awful all at once, on day two.” That reminded me of something my friend Zara had said to me once, when we were renting a flat together when I first moved to London. It was a tiny, damp, third-floor ex-LA flat in Leyton which we rented from an Austrian woman. When I told Zara I’d got the job at the paper, she’d said, “With every job I’ve ever had, if I’d known beforehand exactly what that job entailed, I never would have taken it. But still, congratulations.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down: A Novel

“I read somewhere that some men only love their children for as long as they love the mother of their children. I tried not to think about that too much.”
― Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down: A Novel