A Visit to the Husband Archive Quotes

“Humanity has a limited but active immune response to the Strangers. About six per cent of the population”
― Kaliane Bradley, A Visit to the Husband Archive

“They wanted our experience of time. It’s fuel to them”
― Kaliane Bradley, A Visit to the Husband Archive

“What the Strangers mine from us is conscious”
― Kaliane Bradley, A Visit to the Husband Archive

“I call those things the Strangers because that’s what we called them when they first arrived here. Twenty”
― Kaliane Bradley, A Visit to the Husband Archive

“John (she learned”
― Kaliane Bradley, A Visit to the Husband Archive

“Something wasn’t right. She kept on losing sight of the things in front of her—the kettle, the pump, the range—as if she were walking outside her thoughts. One minute she would be looking at the faucet; the next minute, her memory of Rosa’s whistling was so acute that it shut out the room. Her brain felt densely corridored. There was something going on in there.”
― Kaliane Bradley, A Visit to the Husband Archive

“John had encouraged her to read the books in his box, but reading the books wasn’t like reading municipal notices or rotation schedules. It seemed to require a different style of attention altogether. Whenever she tried to read one, she experienced a pseudoblindness; she could still see, in the sense that there were shapes and colours in front of her, but her brain stopped processing the information about them, and a wall of sorts rose between her and the world.”
― Kaliane Bradley, A Visit to the Husband Archive

“Books,” John told her, a few days into his stay, “are a technology for importing, housing, and spreading ideas. Sometimes an idea takes a whole narrative and cast of characters to make itself understood. Sometimes it just needs one line, such as ‘Manuscripts don’t burn.”
― Kaliane Bradley, A Visit to the Husband Archive