The Girl with the Dogs Quotes

“To live with someone for a long time requires an element of fiction – the selective use of facts to craft an ongoing story. Also the suspension of disbelief: we must believe a story is real while we are in it, and the same goes, Tess thinks, for a marriage.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“They’re so disorganised at work. I got an email last night asking me to stay for the session on Saturday morning after all. I’m sorry. Will you manage?’ Dan pauses the teeth-brushing. ‘Sure,’ he says without turning around. ‘When does that mean you’ll be home?’ ‘Monday night.’ ‘No worries,’ he says, and he believes her, and does not believe her.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“Une grande vie alors,’ he says. ‘A big life, then.’ He gives a kind of Gallic shrug, lifting his arms out and letting them flop at his sides. She leans in and kisses him for a long time. It feels anatomical. She has to get home.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“No worries,’ he says, and he believes her, and does not believe her.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“It is something from the middle of that story that best suits where she is, in the middle of her life. It’s hard to remember exactly, but as she looks at Dan – his spray of acne scars, his sweat-stained shirt – her heart contracts and she understands that this is her one and only life.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“Even though her mother keeps sort of laughing, Charlotte can see that her eyes are full. That’s when she understands that people go on forever wanting things from their parents that they don’t have to give.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“She sees she was a heedless, headhunting child, gathering scalps. On that balcony he was not daring her to choose a life of European complexity over Australian simplicity. He was asking her to make it her real life, by giving up some other, undermining dream.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“When you left,’ he says to the floor, ‘I felt I survive a plane crash.’ One glass of champagne and her mind is leaping, unfettered. ‘But you sent me home.’ ‘No.’ He’s looking at her now, as if saying something he has wanted to say for a long time. ‘I wanted you to choose. I wanted you not to be in two worlds at once, and only partly in mine.’ And then he keeps walking.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“At times in her life – admittedly more dramatic times, including opening nights, speech-giving, and childbirth – she has had the feeling, as she waited in the wings, or went up to the microphone, or changed breathing strategy, that so much of courage is just being too far in to turn back. A point comes when the cost of retreat seems greater than the dread of annihilation to come. And then a strange, fatalistic quiet kicks in and slows your pulse, giving you strength for the last, calamitous push.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“Of course it was practically a rite of passage for a girl from the New World to find a European lover for a while – so many of her friends had done it that it seemed almost an organised part of life, like a language exchange.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“He told her he’d wanted to get far away from the Soviet Union, to a place where its categories did not make sense. Later, she realised that the categories he meant were dissident and nonconformist artist, and underground. But in that moment she was enthralled by the idea itself: that you might escape whatever categories you came from, go somewhere they no longer applied.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“They are at a hinge moment: between youth and age, between the life you thought you wanted and the one you feel might, now, suit you better. They are like hermit crabs who outgrow one shell and need to leave it before they are trapped inside, emerging for a moment, shell-less and pink, vulnerable to predators of every stripe.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special

“For every difficult question of her childhood, for instance about sex or cancer, her father had answered legally accurately (preferably with Latin) and using obscure medical terms (‘lesion’ for tumour, ‘procedure’ for operation). So although he could never be accused of lying he could also never, quite, be understood.”
― Anna Funder, The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special