Missing, Presumed Quotes

“One minute you are loved, and then you are not.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“​Life... is full of compromises you never thought you'd make when you were young.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“She's always rehearsing, having imaginary conversations in her head that preempt real encounters”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“All these people locked in their own thoughts, enmeshed in complicated lives, each of us believing we’re at the center.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Manon knows what lies beneath, how people can seem normal and yet grief swirls about like an unseen tide working against the currents of life, the mourner wrong-footed by its undertow. The bereaved should wear signs, she thinks, saying GRIEF IN PROGRESS—for at least a couple of years.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“The problem of food, for one: it symbolizes everything. She wants delicious morsels, yet cooking for herself is so defeating: a surplus of ingredients, the washing-up unshared, and the sense that it doesn’t matter—the production of it or whether it’s nice.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Her eyes red-rimmed, now brimming, her forehead furrowed with disbelief and anger. There is nothing worse than seeing your mother cry and being the cause.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Tea had featured heavily in the past fortnight. Miriam sometimes felt her belly sloshing with it, like a waterbed, yet still she took tea when it was proffered, for the symbolism, she supposed - solicitude, comfort, warmth. It is the English way, after all.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“She loves a silence with Davy Walker. Some people give good silence, and he is one of them.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Davy, of course, smiling in at her, coffee in hand, the light glowing behind those marvellous ears, like red quotation marks.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“He misses her. He miser her, he misses her, he misses her. ...Seven miserable lonely days of missing someone he never should have been with in the first place, yet wanting her back even so. He wonders if he could overlook her lack of human sympathy and generalized air of bitterness, just so he could have the feeling of being together again.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“​...she wonders if it isn't genetic - the whole personal tidiness thing. One is destined to become one's mother, after all. This thought makes her smile to herself - there are worse things.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“In body, perhaps, but not in spirit, Manon knows what lies beneath, how people can seem normal and yet grief swirls about like an unseen tide working against the currents of life, the mourner wrong-footed by its undertow. The bereaved should wear signs, she thinks, saying GRIEF IN PROGRESS--at least for a couple of years.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“When they'd spotted Rollo down the corridor at the police station in Huntingdon, both she and Ian felt the weak gratitude of the elderly.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Manon wonders: did Gwyneth look into Colin's small, bloodshot eyes and say, "You are the UKIP-voting misogynist for me"?”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Nature doesn't know what to do with a childless woman of thirty-nine, except throw her that fertility curveball--aches and pains combined with extra time, like some terrifying end to a high-stakes football match.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“It'll be a cold walk home past the shuttered-up shops on the high street, the sad, beery air meaning from Cromwell's, and out toward the river, its refreshing green scent and its movement a slithering in the darkness, to her flat, where she has left all the lights burning.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“I sometimes think I don't actually like anyone that much. That all I ever want is to be on my own. And then I can't cope with it--with myself, just myself all the time, and it's like I become the worst company of all--and there's this awful realization that I need people, and it's almost humiliating.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“evidence against”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“She thinks life is best passed in a blur: imprecise and anaesthetised from the sharper feelings”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“The bereaved should wear signs, she thinks, saying: Grief in Progress – for at least a couple of years.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“It was everyone’s fault because it was no one’s.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“a face almost confident, the gorgeous bloom of childhood still radiating from her skin.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“what lies beneath; how people can seem normal and yet grief swirls about like an unseen tide working against the currents of life, the mourner wrong-footed by its undertow. The bereaved should wear signs, she thinks, saying: Grief in Progress – for at least a couple of years.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“The older you get, the less choppy life becomes. But Miriam misses it too—the lurching outer edges of feeling that accompany youth. Nothing is exciting anymore,”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“I am of an age for grief.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Thinking how she loved the very flesh of her. You got used to that with children, love crashing over you like waves.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started —“Little Gidding,” T. S. ELIOT”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“These days, of course, the old dowager names are all the rage; even stalwarts of the Tory party call their children Florence and Alfred with a knowing wink.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“She's alone so much these days, in part because when the sand drifts receded, along with the departure of the children, they left an excess of time, while Ian's existence maintained its steady course, which was essentially Rushing About Being Important.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed