The White Darkness Quotes

“It's true: Everyone needs a reason to stay alive -- someone who justifies your existence. Someone who loves you. Not beyond all reason. Just loves you. Even just shows an interest. Even someone who doesn't exist, or isn't yours. No, no! They don't even have to love you! They just have to be there to love! Target for your arrows. Magnetic Pole to drag on your compass needle and stop it spinning and tell you where you're heading and...Someone to soak up all the yearning. That's what I think.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“He is everything, everything, everything I ever admired and wanted and couldn't have. He is everything I needed and couldn't find in real life. Of course he is. That's why I invented him.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“For some crime committed by my ancestors in the dark and forgotten days, I came into the world already tarred and feathered. With shyness. It hurts terribly -- every bit as much as hot tar choking every pore -- and I wish I could be rid of it. But it hurts a lot less than having someone try and peel the shyness off. That's like being flayed alive.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“There are things roaming around inside my head as clever as Theseus in the Labyrinth. It's just that nobody ever gave them the necessary piece of string, so they'll never find their way out.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“If you want to please me very much, you will fall down when I shoot you," -Oates
The White Darkness”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“Don't struggle too hard to understand people, Sym. They're hideously complicated. Unhappy people do the oddest, most terrible things, just trying to keep despair at bay. All you have to do is accept them...go around them...take evasive action.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“I like people. I like watching them. It's just I'd prefer to do it from a mile away using very poweful binoculars.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“Every crime like this needs someone like me to look away and say nothing.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“That's how it's done, you see. It's the same way people get horses out of burning buildings. When the whole world's on fire around you, you use a blindfold. Everyone needs someone like Titus for a blindfold. ”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“You aren't stupid, Lillian,' said Uncle Victor, smiling and shaking his head, 'but sometimes the things you do are.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“But I refuse to say. Because I love him, and you'd give anything, wouldn't you? You'd give anything for someone you love not to die alone and in scalding agony?”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“When Titus speaks, I can hear every word. For me, that's like when the optician slides home the right lens and all the e's and g's and o's and c's become perfectly clear again and it isn't a struggle, even to read the bottom-most line...His voice touches places inside me like someone moving through a house, flicking light switches...No peering into corners for what's been said.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“The richer you are, I've worked out, the smaller your telephone and the bigger your telephoto lens.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“Like everything perfect, he set up a ferocious pain inside me -- a flickering, griping sort of pain, because nothing as marvelous as that is ever within reach, is it? Nothing as beautiful can ever last.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“The world is hollow. It's a lot to take in. Like cracking an egg and finding nothing inside. Or a full grown elephant.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness