Elmet Quotes

“We all grow into our coffins, Danny. And I saw myself growing into mine.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“It’s like us humans sending rockets up to the moon only to spend the next fifty years gazing at the pictures of our own earth.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“It wasn’t all that wonderful, all the time. Those men who would come together so naturally to support one another would go home drunk and beat their wives.” Ewart was caught for a moment. Vivien continued. “There are dreams, Ewart, and there are memories. And there are memories of dreams.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“You have to appreciate that I never thought of myself as a man. I did not even think of myself as a boy. Of course, if you had asked me I would certainly have replied that that was what I was. It is not as if I had ever actively rejected the designation. I just never thought about it. I had no reason to think about it. I lived with my sister and my father and they were my whole world. I did not think of Cathy as a girl nor as a woman, I thought of her as Cathy. I did not think of Daddy as a man, though I knew that he was. I thought about him, likewise, as Daddy.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“Sometimes, pulling myself out of a dream to be awake and alive in the world was like pulling myself out of my own skin and facing the wind and the rain in my own ripped-raw flesh.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“But I don't have any real interest in anything, you know. I don't really care about anything. Not about the sea or the outdoors or nature or anything. I don't really have any hobbies. My mother and grandmother used to sew things.' She picked up one of the embroidered cushions. 'But it doesn't interest me. I do things for a bit and then get bored. Like painting or writing. It interested me for a while but I gave up.
I think about swimming but I don't swim,' she said. 'I imagine what it would be like to be in the water, especially the sea. I imagine what it would be like to dip my body into the freezing salt water and how it would feel to be fully submerged and then come up for air but I never do it. I don't go to the beach and I don't get into the water. Sometimes I think I could have been an actor. It's the one profession I've never tried. In one way or another, I have spent my whole life impersonating other people. Acting out fantasies with personalities that I've made up in my head. Brave people that go about the world and do things. But it's not like it's the achievements that matter to me, it's the interest. The interest the people I play take in the world around them. I suppose they love it in a way that I don't. They're fanatics.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“But if something happens to my body. Well, I am able to put myself in such a position, that it's like it's not really happening. And if it's like it's not really happening that means it's not really happening. Do you see what I mean?”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“Daddy once told us that battles were only ever fought between two people at any one time. There might be armies and governments and ideologies, but in any given moment there was just one person and another person, one about to kill and one about to be killed. The other men and women who were with you or against you faded away. It was just you and another standing in a muddy field with your skin naked beneath your clothes. And Daddy told us that when we met people we had to remember that, to remember that you can only look directly into one person's pair of eyes at any given time.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“When we passed evergreen pines the shadows became furry as the light gathered and parted their needles like water soaking into a dog's coat.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“I half listened to the plans that were being made now in this lounge between my father and these new friends. I could not help but feel that they too were dancing in the old style and appealing to a kind of morality that had not truly existed since those tall stone crosses were placed in the ground, and even then only in dreams, fables and sagas. Only then in the morality of verse.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“Daddy said that to Mr Price people were like wasps zipping around his head, ready to sting at any moment. He liked to know their movements. He liked to know their intentions. And when he knew those things he could catch them and put them in a breathless jar.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“Waiting is what a true house is about. Making it ours, making it settle, pinning it and us to the seasons, to the months and to the years.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“It is my life and my body and I can’t stand the thought of going out into the world and being terrified by it all, all of the time because I am Danny. I am. And I don’t want to be. I don’t want to feel afraid. All I kept thinking about was Jessica Harmon thrown into that canal and all those other women on the tv, in newspapers found naked covered in mud, covered in blood - blue - twisted -found in the woods, found in ditches, never found. Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about them. Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about how I’m turning into one of them. I’m older now and soon my body will be like theirs. I didn’t want to end up in a ditch.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“Sometimes I think spirit’s dead and gone, but sometimes I think it’s still there, just resting its eyes. A lot of those here are sons and daughters of men that worked with me up at pit. So many passed away before their time. They drank too much and smoked too much and ate too much of this meat. We all did. But I do see something here of that old word. People are as poor now as they ever were, and as tired. And bringing people together of an evening is easier than keeping them apart. And by that same token, bringing a community back together is easier than setting people and families at odds. It’s just that that’s where all effort’s been this last ten years and more.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“He was human, and the gamut upon which his inner life trilled ranged from the translucent surface beyond the deepest crevice of any sea. His music pitched above the hearing of hounds and below the trembling of trees.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“Daddy said that Mr Price just hated to feel the weight of helplessness. To interfere with the lives of others was to carve for himself a presence in the world. Mr Price detested that which he could not control. We lived here on his doorstep yet he had no access to our lives. We did not pay him rent, we did not work for him, we did not owe him any favours. And so he feared us.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“I won’t work for any man ever again. My body is my own. It is all I own.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“There is always doubt. If she turned south when she came to the railway there is no use. She will never be found. I can walk or I can jog or I can sprint or I can just stop in the middle of the tracks and lie down and wait for a train to cut through me; it would make no odds. If she turned south she is lost. But I chose the way north so that is the way I will go.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“What are you, Daniel?'
'I don't know.'
'What are your father and sister?'
'I don't know.'
'Well, if you don't, then how can I? But I do know they're fanatics. When they care about something, whatever it is, they care about it to the full. They care about it as much as anyone can. They don't pretend, like an actor would. They're not concerned with being seen to be doing something. They just do it.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“All was unknown, I recall, though I had trodden those tracks many times before. But the levels look different after dark, and the world is distinct for each individual, and I had been made new as I had walked and I had seen the land like it had been new too.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“I could not help but feel that they too were dancing in the old style and appealing to a kind of morality that had not truly existed since those tall stone crosses were placed in the ground, and even then only in dreams, fables and sagas. Only then in the morality of verse.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“The buildings are built from rock hewed from a different quarry. I had not known that towns and cities had their own character.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“Small, specific pain inflicted with care can be worse than any other kind.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“Sometimes I think spirit’s dead and gone, but sometimes I think it’s still there, just resting its eyes.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“When we walked back to the house we did so in silence, having already got out all our words for the day.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“He was a human, and the gamut upon which his inner life trilled ranged from the translucent surface to beyond the deepest crevice of any sea.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“Suspicion comes from fear, see.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“I kept myself to myself in the early years. I walked around and around the playground pretending to scale great mountain ranges or horizontal marshlands. In the summer months I sat beneath a sycamore tree on the edge of the school field. I collected insects in my hands only to release them at the end of playtime or lunch hour. Daddy asked me if I wanted an insect collecting set for my birthday or some jars to put them in to and take them home but I said I did not. I liked having them in my hands for that certain amount of time then letting them go off again into the undergrowth, back to their homes and to their lives. I would think about them living those lives while I sat back in my chair in the classroom and gazed blankly at times-tables.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet