The Gloaming Quotes

“At any moment the mundane might turn lethal.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“Detail established truth. The color of the dog. Without detail, truth was a metaphysically unstable idea: too general, too big; cause and effect going all the way back to first dates, to ancestors surviving winter storms, to dinosaurs, to organisms in a puddle.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“Memory is narrative. It is not truth. It is the worst witness.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“Paying acolytes. How could you trust someone you paid for a service? A prostitute gave you what you wanted. A therapist gave you what you wanted. What a mistake to believe in the sanctity of memory or dreams. A man might as well believe the romantic murmurings of a call girl.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“It’s strange—isn’t it—how I can take all the bits of the story and fit them one way, or another. … There’s a feeling I have now of crowding, shouting possibilities—that every version is true. And none.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“That morning. When we were having breakfast. I looked at Markus. The sun was on his face and he was busy eating and didn’t see me and I felt such sadness that my child was leaving me. But it’s what they do; it’s their purpose, to leave you. I don’t think you’re ever ready. Are you? Do you have children, Inspector? You know they’ll grow up and have imperfect lives and people will hurt them and they’ll be unsatisfied and selfish, and so I think maybe by leaving now he’s only known happiness and love.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“That morning. When we were having breakfast. I looked at Markus. The sun was on his face and he was busy eating and didn’t see me and I felt such sadness that my child was leaving me. But it’s what they do; it’s their purpose, to leave you. I don’t think you’re ever ready. Are you?”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“People lived with a lot of awful things, some of them very comfortably”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“In the dark, quiet world outside, people were committing unspeakable crimes. Unspeakable, but not unthinkable.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“Mothers who beat their children to death cried just as hard as those whose children had drowned accidentally in the river.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“Sometimes it took parents years to put their dead child’s possessions away. By then, Strebel had observed, it was too late: the ability to move on had been forfeited. Objects wielded great power. Left out, they became museum pieces, totemic. Artifacts. Packed away, they became memories”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming