All the Little Children Quotes

“You know how people say they would die for their kids? I never got that. What good are we dead? What’s hard is living for your kids. We only matter because we matter to them. It’s doubly true now.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“I see it shining”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“check”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“He occupied that boy-man space whereby his scaffolding held up his T-shirt, but the rest of the structure was yet to be filled in.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“People are jigsaws, I think, made up of all their experiences. Home may be one big piece or lots of little pieces, but it’s only one part of the picture.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“People are just walking bags of impulses. Not just teenagers—all of us. We do shitty things because we think we have time to make amends. But sometimes we run out of time.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“People living, people talking. Politics and religion. All the usual shameful human behavior.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“My light revealed pictures of cones and sundaes and something called a “screwball,” which evoked a distant memory of childhood desire.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“parents might be happy”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“I turned round and round in the middle of the road—a broken toy—my wellies clop-clopping over the white line, and the creaking hinges of the pub sign goading me. My mind strobed with thoughts of a man’s face pressed into the pavement, a woman’s teeth grating against glass, virus or poison or plague, an empty dog lead, bodies like carrion, infection everywhere, Joni demanding answers, Mummy always comes back. Do something.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“All these much-celebrated choices that we have, apparently, us modern women. There are no choices, only higher expectations.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“We watched the buzzards soaring with the brutal grace of skateboarding teenagers, up to nothing that was ostensibly no-good, but menacing all the same.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“You know how people say they would die for their kids? I never got that. What good are we dead? What’s hard is living for your kids.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“That was a habit of mine: not paying attention to the things entrusted to my care.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“The tears had washed me out, like an enema for the heart. I was hollow. Light.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“It was Saturday. Still morning. Cloudy with a high risk of tantrums.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“A moment when the worst had already happened, so there was nothing left to worry about. I wanted to stop forever in that pause between cause and effect. A place where I didn’t have to be responsible for everybody all of the time.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“The trouble with the Wikipedia generation is that they cannot tolerate ignorance.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“They used to plant yew trees in graveyards”—Lola’s voice so close it made me jump—“because people believed they drank the poison left by the bodies.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“There seemed to be no end to this wood, and no beginning, and no difference in it, and, worst of all, no way out.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“But that’s what people do, Woody. People are just walking bags of impulses. Not just teenagers—all of us. We do shitty things because we think we have time to make amends. But sometimes we run out of time.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“soft click told me the outside door had been open”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“fingers, but Joni intercepted it and ducked off into the dark to see to him herself. Lola and I exchanged significant looks about this new burst of activity, while Jack gave us a roll call. I lost track after the second Harry and third George. It didn’t help that their faces all looked the same, monochromed by the torchlight, all round eyes and upside-down mouths, as though they’d”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“You know how people say they would die for their kids? I never got that. What good are we dead? What’s hard is living for your kids. We only matter because we matter to them.”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“with an Excel spreadsheet?” I made a face like that was ridiculous, but of course there had been an Excel spreadsheet. As soon as everyone was ready, we set off. Joni tramped away in one direction with my seven-year-old, Maggie, whose foghorn voice sent birds skittering into the sky as she harangued her aunt to hurry so they could get back first. “It’s not a race,” Joni said, fading into the tree line. “I want to get the biggest log,” Maggie bellowed. Joni’s own kid, Lola, refused to leave the camp. With the infinite disdain of a teenager, she said there was no need to fatigue ourselves. Fatigue ourselves. Lola went gliding in her slow-motion gait to pluck dead twigs from the trees, like a nymph picking enchanted fruit for a heartsick knight. She high-stepped off into the undergrowth and, for all I knew, changed into a deer, such was the inscrutable nature of my niece, the Lady Lola. By contrast, the all too scrutable Billy was screaming to go with the big boys, who I knew would abandon him up a tree given half a chance. “Carry me,” he said no more than five feet from the camp. So he scrambled onto my shoulders, his arms clamped in a fierce little”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“All these much-celebrated choices that we have, apparently, us modern women. There are no choices, only higher expectations. Except”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“tea bag in the box. I drew in a deep breath while I gathered all my best expletives into my”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“Farther down the road, a hatchback was wrapped around a lamppost, a hanging basket embedded in its windshield. In the other direction was the desolate cricket field. There were no signs of human life. I”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children

“A kids’ CD was playing quietly on the stereo: a scene from The Wind in the Willows. A plummy voice intoned, “There seemed to be no end to this wood, and no beginning, and no difference in it, and, worst of all, no way out.” I clicked it off. We”
― Jo Furniss, All the Little Children