One of Us Quotes

“Despite our differences, I’d liked Fliss a lot and she had liked me. There had been a time when, as teenagers, she was romantically interested, but I couldn’t pretend to reciprocate. She reminded me both too much of Ben and not enough.”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us: A Novel

“The current rose up from beneath her, snaking its way around her limbs, dragging her down, underneath the surface where the moon spilled its pale fragments, down, down, down, below the silhouetted shoals of fish, down further towards the seabed, down into the depths of that giant void she’d imagined, the one where the pain stopped and she ceased to exist and where her thoughts disintegrated into granules of sand and shell and stone and where she returned to the blissful darkness her soul had always known.”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us: A Novel

“Over the years, as I came to accept my own proclivities, I’d watched as gay couples got married and had babies via surrogate and felt nothing but scorn for their stupidity. Why try so hard to ape the worst examples of heterosexual ego? People only ever want children as replications of themselves. It goes awry because the children they then have are either mirror images and reflect something the parent doesn’t like about themselves, or baffling little monsters who bear no resemblance to their biological inheritance. And they cost so much money, don’t they? I have long believed the ultimate status symbol is not private jets or stately homes or accounts with endless overdraft facilities at Coutts, but the sheer number of progeny a couple can produce, house, feed and send to public school.”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us: A Novel

“People only ever want children as replications of themselves. It goes awry because the children they then have are either mirror images and reflect something the parent doesn’t like about themselves, or baffling little monsters who bear no resemblance to their biological inheritance.”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us: A Novel

“And Jarvis. Of course Jarvis was there without Bitsy, whose mother was ill. Bitsy had always been so dull that even her excuses were boring. She was precisely the kind of person who would have an ill mother.”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us: A Novel

“He thinks I’m still the same old Martin, his Little Shadow, always willing to do his bidding. But I’m not. This time, I’m motivated not by a need to belong, but by a need to bring them down. The whole bloody lot of them. The Fitzmaurices. The Edward Bullers. The greedy men in charge who consider us human material to be mined. Because the supreme art of war, as Sun Tzu said, is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Martin, I can hear Joanne Buster saying, this is not good for your anger management issues. Joanne, I reply, perhaps I don’t want to manage it anymore.”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us: A Novel

“He’s doing that awful reality TV show, did you see it?’ ‘No.’ ‘Not surprised. Chav telly.’ ‘But I am a chav, Serena.’ The corners of her mouth curl. ‘I know, darling, but you’re the right kind. You piss away from the tent.’ Is that even an expression? As much as she has lost her beauty, she has grown in a kind of caustic confidence.”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us: A Novel

“My back breaks out in a sweat. I feel all the long-buried sensations excavate themselves from their shallow graves. There’s the shame. Ah yes, and how kind of humiliation to join. Did you bring outsidership? And is that my old chum imposter syndrome standing beside you? Wonderful! Oh, but here’s the one we’ve all been waiting for. I wasn’t sure if he’d show up, but of course he never misses a chance to muscle in. It’s anger! Hello, anger. Good of you to be here.”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us: A Novel

“The train was running late because it always ran late. It is a pet theory of mine that the British like to keep their railway system in a state of terminal inefficiency as it distinguishes us from Nazi Germany. We believe we are a country incapable of dictatorial rule when, in truth, we are just as susceptible to the lure of monstrous men (and it is always men) as everywhere else. It’s simply that we hide it more cleverly.”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us: A Novel

“She’d been careful to hide her identity and even though the protest had been reported at length in her dad’s preferred Sunday newspaper, he hadn’t clocked his daughter in any of the photographs either.”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us: A Novel

“Lately, she’s been reassessing. Being Ben’s plus one no longer satisfies her in the way that it used to. It’s inconvenient to feel like this, but it’s also inescapable. Everyone always assumes she shares Ben’s politics. She’s viewed like a Ming vase: beautiful but empty; a little fragile. This lack of an individual identity never used to bother her. She had long thought of politics as an overgrown debating club and had looked down on it as a ridiculous kind of pastime. Now, the ridicule has calcified into annoyance. Considering all those many, many hours Ben has spent in the House of Commons, and all the sacrifices (financial and personal) they have made for him to sit on those green benches pompously arguing over import tariffs and border controls, it’s baffling how little ever actually changes. Why, when all these powerful MPs claim so confidently to have the answers, are there still mothers going to food banks and children being sent to school on empty stomachs and homeless people huddled on almost every street corner?”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us: A Novel

“It’s not that I hate my therapist.”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us: A Novel

“It’s a funny thing”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us: A Novel

“I don’t mean to be rude”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us

“It’s so much easier for younger women”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us

“Politics. The art of changing nothing while pretending to change it all.”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us

“which is another thing that wealth and pedigree affords you: self-esteem insulated from outside opinion; an ability to act on whatever emotion you might be experiencing in any given moment.”
― Elizabeth Day, One of Us