When She Was Bad Quotes

“Imagine we could see the damage inside ourselves. Imagine it showed through us like contraband on an airport scanner. What would it be like, to walk around the city with it all on view – all the hurts and the betrayals and the things that diminished us; all the crushed dreams and the broken hearts? What would it be like to see the people our lives have made us? The people we are, under our skin. I”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Just how many ways it's possible to fuck up a child so badly that ten, twenty, forty years later they're still trying to make sense of it.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“It's like those kids who grow up in houses where the parents speak different languages and turn out bilingual. If they're exposed to something at an early enough age, they absorb it naturally and becomes just something normal.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Once she’d thought him the most handsome man in the world, and the knowledge that most women wouldn’t look at him twice only made him more special, as if he was a brilliant artist whose work only she appreciated.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Kristen was a plump girl with a wide, doughy face, who always blinked before talking to you as if trying to expel an unwelcome image that had come unbidden into her head.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“of it was a plastic bottle”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“If Ewan was a drink... he'd be whisky because he seems like a good idea when you're drunk but he makes you feel like shit in the morning. Haha!”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“My house has one integral living space and I am sitting on the couch facing the TV, while she is perched on a stool at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, my laptop open in front of her. We have adopted these same positions so many times over the years, it’s like we have worn a groove in time. I imagine us suspended here for ever, like tiny figures in a doll’s house.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Back then, I was looking for the big love story, the charismatic stranger. I didn’t learn until it was way too late, until long after my failed marriage to Johnny, that love doesn’t ride into town and sweep you off your feet, but sometimes looks at you in a certain way and you realize it was there all the time, right under your nose.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“It was something she’d told him off about on more than one occasion, this tendency to offer up his private sadnesses as a form of mass entertainment.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Charlie had come to believe himself an outsider to love. Not that he was incapable of it, or immune to it. Not at all. He was an incurable romantic, as many inveterate cynics often are. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe love was possible because he absolutely did, but rather that he didn’t believe it was possible for him. So he was doomed to live in a permanent state of quiet unfulfilment. And then he met Stefan.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Fling. That’s how he saw their night together. She’d been thinking of box-sets with a blanket over their laps and mini-breaks to Rome or Berlin and making love in front of an open fire or on a deserted beach with the sun reflecting gold in those amber flecks in his eyes . . . and he’d been thinking ‘fling’.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“When you’re a parent it’s like you wear your heart on the outside of your body.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Sarah couldn’t remember when she’d last seen Charlie this happy. It was as if someone had yanked the dial of the dimmer switch round, lighting him up from inside. Normal Charlie was an endearing if reserved mix of cynicism and kindness, warmth and resignation. Now he shone with an emotional energy so exposing you almost wanted to look away, as if you were seeing something you shouldn’t.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“The corridor of the Psychiatry Department of La Luz City University Medical Facility was a sterile affair. Since then it’s been painted in a mellow magnolia and there’s some framed artwork on the walls. We had a memo before the prints went up, checking whether we considered them suitably ‘non-stimulating’. We all joked about that for a long time afterwards. ‘Nice jacket,’ we’d say, ‘but are you sure it’s non-stimulating enough?”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad