The Toy Car Quotes

“We make everything ours. What I mean is, we carry the world in our heads, all our crazy thoughts and feelings about it, we’ve got them inside us, haven’t we? We’ve got them forever, like Despina’s laughter. We carry them with us, on and on through time.”
― Rose Tremain, The Toy Car: A Short Story

“Yiorgos needed the driving job and Fanis needed his friend’s laughter;”
― Rose Tremain, The Toy Car: A Short Story

“He knew that nobody in his life had ever given him instructions on how to endure being alone.”
― Rose Tremain, The Toy Car: A Short Story

“The Awful Cupboard, the space where they put all the things they no longer liked or needed but which they thought they might like or need one day in the future.”
― Rose Tremain, The Toy Car: A Short Story

“Then, as the ferry hooted, he put into Petros’s hands a toy car in a small box. ‘Mercedes taxi, OK?’ he said. ‘Keep it in your sight. Remember the fucking thing. Then you’ll come back.”
― Rose Tremain, The Toy Car: A Short Story

“Here, everything is known to us. We know who to ask for whatever we want, and how to get it. But in a big foreign city, who are you going to talk to when things go wrong?”
― Rose Tremain, The Toy Car: A Short Story

“I’m not trying to say something; I am saying something. Does Petros have a mother as well as a father – that’s what I’m asking you. And, if so, of what nationality is that mother?”
― Rose Tremain, The Toy Car: A Short Story

“Fanis Castellanos suffered from bouts of existential melancholy from which only the piratical behaviour and wild humour of Yiorgos Pagonis seemed able to rescue him. Yiorgos needed the driving job and Fanis needed his friend’s laughter; that was just how it was.”
― Rose Tremain, The Toy Car: A Short Story