The Long Dry Quotes

“Like when it stops raining?' she said. Nothing had ever moved him more in his life than the beautiful questions of children.

'Yes. Like when it stops raining.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry

“{His child} says she doesn't have the right pencils for the colors she sees.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry

“Over the hills behind the farm the light started. Just a thinning of the very black night that made the stars twinkle more, vibrate like a bird's throat, and put out a light loud compared to their tininess.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry

“We're expected to love too much and too long. He mustn't be like this, he thinks, he mustn't let this dark thing take him: this ever-hungry, very close big cloud of not caring anymore, and of not wanting. This is the enemy that must be fought until the end.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry

“The two boys had come along and found the rabbit dying by the bank. The breeze was up a little and it was nice because it had been dry for so long, and still, and the rabbit was wet and matted like a cloth, like a dog when it gets wet. At first they thought it was dead. It had the shapelessness of meat.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry

“Now the pain is not there, she wonders briefly, lucidly, whether it was real. It's hard to recall pain when we are not in it. We remember it vaguely, descriptively, by making it live almost, like a creature, giving it some deliberating quality.

They seem to have two ways of bringing her down, these headaches: the sharp point of today, which makes it as if she can only know the world through it, like looking out of a pin-hole; and a weight. A weight that is heavy like mud: that first brief and dull feel when you hit your head, but staying that way, not developing, just numb, heavy, until it seems to break off like a beach cliff and slide down one side of her body of her body in a slow avalanche of pain. Then they just seem to go.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry

“In a pigeon's cells, somewhere in their head, tiny magnetic crystals survive, tiny pieces of iron ore called magnetite. Invisible lodestones, tinier than dust, creating a compass, sensing polarity, the inclination of magnetic fields around the earth.

The electronic particles in the crystal, moving between different ions in a structured path, turn the ore magnetic and tell the pigeons their way. They've also found this in the brains of bees.

They've found iron too in their otolith organs, in their inner ear—the things which give them a sense of where they are in the air, of the space they move through. If the earth's geomagnetics are wrong, they get lost.

It makes you wonder what crystals run through us, what drops of salt? Because something in us gives us a sense of where we should be, too, if we listen.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry

“There was more to what she said than beautifully bad grammar. It belied her logic. Since she was very tiny she'd always thought the best thing to do with any pain or worry was to go to bed. Because the thing that hurt you had to go to sleep as well. Then all you had to do was wake up very quietly, so you didn't wake the bad thing up. Then you got out of bed and left it sleeping, so it didn't hurt you anymore.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry

“Gareth remembers too the time he tried to explain to her about dandelions, which she loved—perhaps because of the magic of their changing too. Her love for things which weren't what you thought they were. She loved to play with dandelion clocks ever since hi mother had shown her how to tell the time with them, this spurious decision as to time complying with Emmy's way of seeing the world.

She had spent a long time picking dandelion flowers one day and they were proudly laid out on her bedroom floor. When they hadn't changed to clocks by the next morning she thought perhaps it was because she kept peeking and magic only happened when you didn't look. Gareth tried to explain that they had to be alive to turn to clocks. 'But they are dead when they are clocks,' she said. 'Well, they've changed' he tried to say. 'They have to be alive to change. The flower has to die to change into seed. They die to make more dandelions.' One dandelion dying makes a thousand new flowers. 'People don't do that, do they?' she said. 'No,' said Gareth. 'People don't do that.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry

“It does not matter whether he remembers it accurately or not, this is his memory of it; and this is how it will live.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry

“Ducks can be a menace.

People are seduced by ducks; by their seeming placidity. They fall for the apparent imbecility of their smiles and their quietly lunatic quacking. But they are dangerous things which plot, like functioning addicts.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry

“Ducks can be a menace.

People are seduced by duck; by their seeming placidity. They fall for the apparent imbecility of their smiles and their quietly lunatic quacking. But they are dangerous things which plot, like functioning addicts.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry

“As part of a move to make a continent look better, money was given to the small town to improve itself, and they built a holding pool for the...fishing boats that would still work in the winter when it was too rough...The holding pool filled with ducks and they shat everywhere. There were hundreds of ducks....
Given the way they have to have sex, it's remarkable that there are *any* ducks. ... The male more or less drowns the female, who has to focus hard on staying afloat, and they both have to deal with wings and beaks and water and feathers, and it looks nasty, and they still have sex. So there were a great many ducks. And they all shat everywhere.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry

“You use care like a weapon,' he says. It's like a greenhouse breaking.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry

“He thinks of her perfect feet - how for years after they’d met she’d still kick off her shoes at every opportunity, to be barefoot. When did she stop doing this, he thinks. He did not notice. It gives him a strange guilt.”
― Cynan Jones, The Long Dry