Dear Thief Quotes

“This is what writing does to you, it seems, it turns objects that used to be just things in your life into things that must be described, and at the same time makes them feel increasingly indescribable.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“There is freedom there; there is always freedom in the past. The self you left behind lives in endless possibility. The older you get, the bigger and wilder the past becomes, a place that can never again be tended and which is therefore prone to that loveliness that happens on wastelands and wildernesses, where grass has grown over scrap metal and wheat has sprung up in cracks between concrete and there is no regular shape for the light to fall flat on, so it vaults and multiplies and you want to go there. You want to go there like you want to go to a lover.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“while it only requires a single yes to get married, to get divorced you have to say no so many times in so many different ways, and so expensively, that it does not always seem worth the trouble.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“Nothing had changed since those days except that everything had degraded and two decades of light had beaten the colours back a shade.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“How do you tell the difference between a person made of flesh and one made of words?”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“It is not for us to try to change the world to something that suits us better, but for us to change, to bend to a greater weight.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“This must be grace, to be defeated by one's better nature.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“You would think that living is a kind of scholarship in time, and that the longer we live the more expert we become at coping with it, in the way that, if you play tennis enough, you get used to coping with faster and faster serves. Instead I find that the longer I live the more bemused I become, and the more impenetrable the subject shows itself to be. I sit on a heap of days.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“elderly people acquire an unpredictable, unreliable look, almost impish in some, as though they are slipping between gears.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“You appraise every word of them, each abstruse, unwavering and rousing word. Book II of the Taittiriya Upanishad, the book of joy: Man’s elemental Self comes from food: this his head; this his right arm; this his left arm; this his heart; these legs his foundation. You get up and pace. Food gives rise to the Self? Food gives rise to the Self? The Self—Atman—is in food, and rises from food to vegetation to earth to water to air to Spirit to Brahman. Atman and Brahman are in the eel pressed indecorously between two pieces of stale bread! In the lowest things the glow of universal Spirit—but wait, the elemental Self, the living Self, the thinking Self. Legs are the elemental Self, but is the head, the brain, the mind?”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“It reminded me that, for all that you love to call a spade a spade, the spade is always a symbol for something else.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“The greatest tyranny of all is men's possession of women and women's possession of men. We want to own one another so that the other cannot outgrow us. You know how Chinese women bind their feet until the feet are deformed? This is what we do to one another's hearts.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“. . . I have gradually come to believe that what's written cannot simply be amended to suit some later preference and so I have decided this is the way I will go on, writing without amendments, transparently . . . as though any of what I wrote mattered in the slightest.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“He said I was trying as usual to solve the future before it had become a problem. But it seems to me, Butterfly, that men have never really heard of forethought.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“When I got you home and we asked where you had been, you said, ‘I’ve been in an elevator, going up and down.’ So we sat you out in the garden at the mossy table and gave you tea, and asked you again. ‘I’ve been in an elevator, looking for love.’ ‘For two years?’ we asked. ‘Love is hard to find.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief