The Night Visitor Quotes

“It is, I’ve realized, entirely possible to hold two realities in one’s mind simultaneously, and to believe them both at a visceral level.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“People are all the same, really. The one thing you can rely on is that they will behave exactly as you feared they might.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“The collective noun for pigeons is a ‘passel’, an indefinite quantity, uncountable, impossible to pin down.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“Everything was moving so fast that bits of her mind were coming loose and flying off.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“collective nouns. I used to make lists of them: a watch of nightingales, a stare of owls, a mutation of thrushes, a murder of crows. I look at my hollow oak and I think of all the life teeming inside her, unseen, concealed, unappreciated but vital.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“But while she was busy polishing the outside, the inside had rotted away. She put make-up on, covering her feverish skin with foundation and lining her already darkened eyes.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“She hated children. Loved dogs, though. Terribly British of her.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“It is a failing of mine that when something interests me, I find it extremely difficult to stop talking once I have started.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“Jackdaws are bold and inquisitive birds, the narcissists of myth and folklore, capable of devious plotting and devoted to thievery. Their collective noun is a ‘clattering’.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“Whilst never submissive, she certainly cares too much what people think of her – a single harsh comment can derail and preoccupy her. She is highly ambitious, though she disguises that well, from herself as much as from others.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“People used to hide things under the floorboards to distract the evil spirits, so they wouldn’t hurt the family. A sort of decoy.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“Of course, the human brain is biologically wired for trickery; we must be alert to the unseen threat. Our capacity for visitations, chimeras and frights is a perfectly sensible evolutionary by-product.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“There was a bunch of pale pink peonies in a tin jug on the table. Peonies are her favourite flower. They stand for ‘shame’ in the Victorian language of flowers”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“But what will not ambition and revenge Descend to?’ John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book Nine”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor