The Outrun Quotes

“In grandiose moments, high on fresh air and freedom on the hill, I study my personal geology.

My body is a continent. Forces are at work in the night. A bruxist, I grind my teeth in my sleep, like tectonic plates. When I blink the sun flickers, my breath pushes the clouds across the sky and the waves roll into the shore in time with my beating heart. Lightning strikes every time I sneeze, and when I orgasm, there's an earthquake. The islands' headlands rise above the sea, like my limbs in the bathtub, my freckles are famous landmarks and my tears rivers. My lovers are tectonic plates and stone cathedrals.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“I’ve swapped disco lights for celestial lights but I’m still surrounded by dancers. I am orbited by sixty-seven moons.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“I'm filling the void with new knowledge and moments of beauty. The dangerous thoughts will happen - and while I'm experiencing them I feel like that's the way I will feel for ever - but I just have to let the cravings pass lightly.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“My life was rough and windy and tangled. Growing up in the wind leaves you strong, sloped and adept at seeking shelter.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“I long for him to know I’m doing better but I won’t be truly better until I no longer want him to know.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“I am finding new priorities and pleasures for my free time. I’ve known this was possible but it takes a while for emotions to catch up with intellect.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“People like to tell me I’m looking ‘well’ but there are late hours alone when my heart is an open wound and I wonder if the pain will ever stop brimming fresh.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“I stopped drinking to do things, rather than to spend my time talking about stopping drinking”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“I have twenty tabs open, each an endless journey, an unfinished thought. I can’t go to sleep yet: there are too many tabs open in my brain.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“I want to make connections and to communicate because we are only and really alive right now. I still want to experience the extremes so I must find ways to fulfil this need sober. I must be brave. I wonder if I can still be cheeky or flirtatious without booze. If I master this, I could be unstoppable. In the past months I’ve been stifled by bruised confidence and anxiety, but these things take time. I’m gradually learning to say things sober that other people wait to say drunk.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“Drinking solves nothing. Afterwards, the problems are still there.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“Rain on me. Strike me with fire. I feel like lightning in slow motion. I am one fathom deep and contain the unknown. I am vibrating at a frequency invisible to man and I'm ready to be brave.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“I want something to take the edge off. But I’m realising that times of anxiety are necessary and unavoidable and, in any case, I like the edge: it’s where I get my best ideas. The edge is where I’m from. It’s my home.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“Energy never expires. The energy of waves, carried across the ocean, changes into noise and heat and vibrations that are absorbed into the land and passed through the generations.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“The last breeding great auk in Britain was shot in 1813 on Papay, ordered by a collector in London. In the nineties, Papay schoolkids performed a play about the bird: Raiders of the Last”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“I think about the earth’s rotation, and realise that it’s not the tide that is going out or the moon rising: rather, I am moving away from them.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“I wonder if it’s possible to really come back once you’ve lived away for a while, or if it’s called coming ‘home’ when you never belonged.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“I think about how the moon is getting further away from the Earth and although this is only happening at about 3.78 centimeters per year, or the same speed at which our fingernails grow, it seems terribly sad.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“an anemometer on a post at ten metres height, the Met standard, measures winds; a beautiful device that looks like a crystal ball records sunshine.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“Short-term weather forecasting is best done by looking out of the window”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“I am free-falling but grabbing these things as I plunge. Maybe this is what happens. I've given up drugs, don't believe in God and love has gone wrong, so now I find my happiness and flight in the world around me.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“part of me thinks that these wildly swinging fluctuations are, if not normal, at least desirable, and I grew to expect and even seek the edge. The alternative, of balance, seems pale and limited. I seek sensation and want to be more alive.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“friend tells me that the cairn is – like the tomb of Maeshowe on the Orkney Mainland – aligned with the midwinter sun. At Maeshowe, on the solstice and a few days on either side, on the rare cloudless days at that time of year, the setting sun will shine directly down the entrance corridor. Webcams are set up there and one midwinter afternoon I watch over the internet as the golden light hits the end wall.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“When I am experiencing the impulse to drink, I try to examine it further, that false promise. I am experiencing discomfort and want something to provide flow and easiness. I want something to take the edge off. But I'm realising that times of anxiety are necessary and unavoidable, and, in any case, I like the edge: it's where I get my best ideas. The edge is where I'm from. It's my home.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“As I drive, I try to unpick what happened: all the houses I've lived in, the lost jobs, the treatment centre, my aching heart.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“By ‘edge’ I mean my cool, by which I mean my enlivening sense of discontent, and my youth, and sex – narrowed eyes and full lips – and enjoyment of testing the boundaries, of saying something uncomfortable and an excitement in the unexpected.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“He told me that would be the last time and afterwards, using Sellotape, I collected his chest hairs, which had gathered in the sweat in my navel, and stuck them in the pages of my diary.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“Although we chatted easily about the small things, there were the gaps when I wasn’t there. I’d drink until my eyes went dead. Back then he had patience for my tears and blank-outs.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“I wanted to rub the city onto my skin; I wanted to inhale the streets.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

“I grew up in the sky, with an immense sense of space”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun