The Life to Come Quotes

“George moved from one group of people he didn’t know to another, trying to get out of the draught. The girls didn’t seem to notice it. They were Sydney girls, with short skirts and long, bare arms. Recently, George had gone to an opening at a gallery in the company of a visiting lecturer from Berlin. The artist was fashionable, and the gallery’s three rooms were packed. Over dinner, the German woman expressed mild astonishment at the number of sex workers who had attended the opening. ‘Is this typical in Australia?’ she asked. George had to explain that she had misunderstood the significance of shouty make-up, tiny, shiny dresses and jewels so large they looked fake.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“people suffer much more from the promises they don’t make than the ones they can’t keep”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“All the while, she understood that nothing could save her from the emptiness of the years that still had to be lived. Days passed, and weeks, and no one said her name.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“It was one of those golden July afternoons stolen from spring, and they sat outside in T-shirts drinking beer.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“Predictably, the national broadcaster—a viper’s nest of socialists, tree-huggers and ugly, barren females—had seized on the survey, exhuming one of its bleeding-heart ideologues to moan about funding cuts to education.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“Four years in, she had discovered the gallery when a hailstorm chased her off the street. The door stuck - it still did - and was set back from the street between two shops that sold vintage clothing. Glenice climbed the stairs and went in. A grey-faced man peered out around a curtain at the far end of the room. He nodded, and returned to his heater and his laptop. He knew Glenice of old: she wouldn't buy, steal or vandalise anything, and he had no interest in her. His lumpy black cat strolled out, inspected Glenice, tested the patch of light that the window threw on the floor and stalked back into the office.
Quite often there was something here for Glenice. Today it was a room with a table, a vase, a dish of fruit and part of a window. The hungry blue of the window frame clashed perfectly with the blue of the tablecloth without taking it over. The vase held flowers, mauve, pinky yellow, pale red, blackish - Glenice tried and failed to call up the names of black flowers. The wall was a quiet, mortal sort of pink, and there were sleepy-looking pears slumped on a green dish. It looked to Glenice like the kind of room in which someone had gradually recovered from a long illness. She stared at the painting until her feet died from the cold and then she left.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“The light, now down to its grotty underwear, was cinematically sad.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“The man behind the counter was as elongated and flat as if he had passed under a roller. Wrapped in the dusty smell of lentils, he was anomalous among the spices and Bollywood DVDs, having clad his two dimensions in a bureaucrat's pressed trousers and pinstriped shirt.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“At their first meeting, she handed George a reading list made up of French and German philosophers. When George settled down to read these texts, he discovered something astonishing: the meaning of each word was clear and the meaning of sentences baffled. Insignificant yet crucial words like 'however' and 'which'- words whose meaning was surely beyond dispute - had been deployed in ways that made no sense.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“There were mortuary-white tiles on the floor, and the lights were fluorescent tubes that looked as if they would be fatal to insects.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“Like so much that is true, it was of no help at all.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“George noticed her feet again. They were nuggety and rectangular, like a young child’s feet—even the sparkly turquoise nail polish belonged to a child. He wondered if Pippa bothered with right and left shoes.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“In Rome, Matt had told her, ‘I knew that if I kept up my playing, we would have a baby.’ That was what music represented to him now: a bargain he had sought with fate. In a less anaemic age, he would have sacrificed virgins or immaculate lambs.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“He had been a shy, affectionate child to whom Céleste fed Milo straight from the tin. Sometimes she tortured him, singing, ‘Dominiquenique-nique…’ while slitting her eyes until his chin shook.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“She had almost reached the cafe before Céleste identified Pippa, imposterish without beret and lampshade dress, her iPod shining through her pocket. At the time, it was merely something else unexpected, an element of the mildly extraordinary evening. But long after the open windows and the tiny running children had vanished, that memory of Pippa would persist. She made her way towards Céleste like a citizen of the future, her heart rectangular and glowing in the dusk.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come