The Backward Shadow Quotes

“There’s nothing, of course, more damaging and hurtful to the psyche than that—searching grimly for things to despise and revile in a person you once loved. You may destroy the beloved image but at the same time you destroy part of the basis of your self-respect, plus a whole vital chunk out of your past. Because, if he is hateful now, what aberration once caused you to waste so much love on him?”
― Lynne Reid Banks, The Backward Shadow

“Things like this—love-relationships—need a certain minimum of proximity to keep them going.”
― Lynne Reid Banks, The Backward Shadow

“Love lost by one moment’s explicit unfairness can’t be won back by trying to justify it”
― Lynne Reid Banks, The Backward Shadow

“Among the innumerable books on Addy’s shelves was one by Ernest Hemingway in which I found these words: ‘What is moral is what you feel good after. What is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
― Lynne Reid Banks, The Backward Shadow

“Work, that supposed panacea, the great Taker-of-Your-Mind-Off, proved just about as totally useless and in fact irrelevant as those ‘Easy Childbirth’ theories are in the face of the real thing.”
― Lynne Reid Banks, The Backward Shadow

“If the ending is messy, one doesn’t remember anything good about any of it.”
― Lynne Reid Banks, The Backward Shadow

“When you’ve loved somebody for a long time, and then it stops, it’s akin to an amputation in that you go on feeling the cut-off part long after it’s been taken away. All sorts of nervous and emotional impulses set out to travel to their accustomed stations, and when they come up against the new, raw barrier, they’re carried through it by their own impetus, and only then, finding themselves shooting through empty space, do they dwindle and die away.”
― Lynne Reid Banks, The Backward Shadow

“It seems to me those are just the ones who have to do without, because, in the final analysis, they can. And men basically want women who can’t live without them.”
― Lynne Reid Banks, The Backward Shadow

“That’s my whole trouble. I don’t seem capable of living for the moment. It’s as if the future threw back a shadow—a great black shadow of years of loneliness, and it terrifies me so much that I keep lighting little futile lights to try to drive the shadow away.”
― Lynne Reid Banks, The Backward Shadow