Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas Quotes

“Only later I felt that poetry is like feeling another person lying next to you in the dark. Do you believe in poetry, in the spirit of poetry? I could see poetry in ballads, in the picture of the cathedral on the back of the postcard that my father sent my mother from London, in glaciers, peaks of mountains, river dust, Ian McEwan's covers of his books, cheap thrillers. Running gave me a gravitational pull. Running was my mother love. I was barefoot. There I was dressed in white. Matchstick legs. Hair standing up. I did not feel like a zero. I did not feel like a lost oar, unloved and unwanted, like a plant that needed water. A fleet of paper ships that needed to be mourned. I often felt homesick for the country of my mother.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“My mother is a homemaker now after being a teacher.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“I never touched drink. It uproots you. Plants you some place you will never remember the morning after.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“To me she was beautiful, this artist's model, this film extra, a woman who had been married three times. I think she would understand my chronic illness, my fatigue, and me. I think we would be best friends or pen pals.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“Life has hurt me so I have no companions.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“Blood is red. Dust is the answer after all in the end. Sleep does not have a house. Does not have a quantity. Blood has a house. Lungs have a house. They all have quantities. Reality was darkness to me. I lived in darkness all my life.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“The end of the book also means the death of the book and after that comes the mania and depression. One or the other.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“Life has hurt me. When life hurts you, which way do you go, up or down? When life hurts you what happens to a healthy body, a healthy mind? They gradually, gradually diminish. Evaporate. There was a false self. A Peter who believed in his power, that he could dominate any situation that he found himself in, that he could smoke and drink and be one of the guys but also a Lothario.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“If I were an alcoholic, a raging alcoholic, I would drink all my sorrows away. Sadness to me reminds me of Hemingway driving ambulances in the war. No way out. Sadness reminds me of Monroe. No way out.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“Does this mean that men evolve faster than women do, would we ever live in an integrated society where the sexes would be equal? The bewildered self is unchanging. Men are unchanging when it comes top sex. Inertia. That would be the first word to describe my personality. Frightened and confused when it comes to sex, sensuality and the sexual transaction. Men will give you money to go away. Men do not want you to make trouble for them. I poured myself into After Leaving Mr Mackenzie. I poured myself into Jean Rhys' novels and I saw more than sadness, suffering, losing youth there. I saw human rights. The men perhaps had all the power because they had the money but who was the greater, the woman or the man with her beguiling attractiveness, her youthful appeal, her attractiveness.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“I am home for good like a tiny shoot. The tiny shoots in my mother's garden. I have a passion for idle chatter about books, language and literature. Preparing a meal together, that can be romantic.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“The light a sun. When I was a child, I thought that sleep came with darkness. When I grew older, I took long naps in the glare of the afternoon sunlight. The darkness was my enemy. Daylight was a triumph.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“I write about him to make the ghost stories go away. Everything that haunts me.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“Children are never mistakes. They might not all have been conceived in life but they are never mistakes.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“Poetry invades loneliness in a way that nothing else can. I thought that if I changed that people, beautiful people, arrogant people, narcissists, intellectuals, readers, teachers, spiritual gurus would come into my life but they did not. I am still rowing my boat ashore. It still feels like Hiroshima out there.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“You have to be a person of integrity. If you are a nurse, teacher, mentor or drive ambulances, work in a kitchen you have to be a person of integrity.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“To run with scissors has given my poetry depth.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“I want to talk about how I survived. It is not a long story. It is only a few pages long. It started with the word 'winter'.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“This body did not live for me.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“Pain is like a storm. Falling in love is like a storm. Obesity is like a storm. One day it is there and the next day it is still there.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“I would dream of birds and flora, beasts and cave dwellers. Every childhood night was a broken night. My sister escaped. For a while, my brother did too (extraordinarily).”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“The bones of the year has left us with much breathing lessons. I want to swim away from the tigers.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“Telepathy. I am waving to my dad at the hospital again in my dreams. In reality, he is sick again. Been hearing voices. Calling out for me in the middle of the night. Midnight. The hour of blue. Rachel's hour. My mother ignores him for me so it is my job to clean him when he has wet himself. I change the sheets. Cannot leave him to sleep like that. I do not want to leave him at the hospital. Nobody understands why I want him home. They want to put him in a home for elderly people where they will take his whole pension and leave him with nothing. Ian doesn't understand about 'hearing voices', 'hallucinations'.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“The child comes to me. His mother gives him to me. I don't know why they trust me with him. I feel I can hurt him the way I was hurt as a child.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“But trust me it can be good for the bones like Paris. I wish I had a dress that I could go anywhere with but I am not one of those girls who can purge their unhappiness like that.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“If I trace its breaking point I come across the eternity of the primitive impulse. The sea river is a cold impasse. Will I find secrets there? In my dream I am standing on a frozen lake, the second sex and I can hear female voices all around me.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“In his eyes I forget time, burnt diaries, midnight, and ballads. I forget that I am growing older. One day I will be an old woman.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas

“What it takes to build muscle in a mysterious, intriguing world. You weave the awful, the terrible things that happened to you as a child into a story.”
― Abigail George, Sleeping Under Kitchen Tables in the Northern Areas