The Sea House Quotes

“How strange it was to...watch her walk round the table and the chairs by the fire, pick up my shells from the shore along the mantelpiece, and smile at everything and examine it as if she were reading the story of my life in the intervening years. She ran her hand along the book spines on the shelves, stopping to greet an old friend as she took it down to read a little.”
― Elisabeth Gifford, The Sea House

“I still hadn’t understood; how there’s a certain smell to a dispossessed soul, acrid, bitter as smoke, the irrefutable odour of an angry refugee, banging on the doors of strangers,”
― Elisabeth Gifford, Secrets of the Sea House

“And my body grew and swelled and tore and I became a new creature, a mother. And I saw that all my old life stopped then. It was up to me, to choose to let go, because me and my hands, we had to stop asking and we had to start giving; we had to stop fighting and start holding instead.”
― Elisabeth Gifford, The Sea House

“I stayed with Annie through that week, helping to dig out some of the moor peat into banks to let the soil drain, going down to the foreshore where the bay is ringed with rocks covered in brown seaweed like heads covered in long hair; the great heads of old gods about to rise up from under the water, it felt to me, as I filled my creel, the water lap, lapping against the rocks, the oyster catchers piping their sad and lonely notes. Then we must climb the hill with baskets of weed to turn the soil less sour. It was a marvel to see how those that had long lived there had crofted a farmland from barrenness, and heartbreaking to see how small the plots.”
― Elisabeth Gifford, The Sea House