Bitter Orange Quotes

“Beautiful on the surface, but look a little closer and everything is decaying, rotting, falling apart.”
― Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange: A Novel

“But the world is a nicer place when you think everyone is telling the truth. There are no agendas, no hidden motives; no one lies for dramatic effect.”
― Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange: A Novel

“I learned from the wig-men that the law is not about finding the truth, it is about who can tell the most convincing story. It is a game that must be grasped swiftly if you want to win, even if to everyone else it looks as though you have lost.”
― Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange

“Her story would have been simply memory and imagination without me to hear it; undiscovered and unaired, like a book without a reader. My second role was from the wings: the prompter.”
― Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange: A Novel

“The all-seeing eye. What has it seen? Nothing as interesting as the things I saw through the judas hole at Lyntons. But of course, the difference is privacy. The other women will complain and shout about being looked at without warning. But I think it is better to know when someone is watching rather than to live your life under an invisible gaze.”
― Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange

“Who wouldn’t want to rewrite their past, if it means it will change their future?”
― Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange: A Novel

“Now I am a woman of bone and skin, the patches of pigmentation like a map of a rocky archipelago; I am obdurate and uncooperative, drifting on a sea of memory between islands of lucidity.”
― Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange: A Novel

“I can't help them," he said. "I couldn't help with medicine and I cant help with faith. And the trouble is they want too much help, too much forgiveness. Sometimes it's like they’re each taking a little bit of me, inch by inch, cell by cell, until poof”
― Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange

“it occurred to me that it was a type of control; Cara could be generous when it suited her, or not, when it didn’t.”
― Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange: A Novel

“If food is worth eating, it's worth eating properly”
― Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange

“I shifted and the stiff underwear creaked, a loud awkward noise which none of us commented on.”
― Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange: A Novel

“Yours have passed away too?” I asked her. She shrugged and said, “Peter still has both of his, squirrelled away in Devon or Dorset.” Her voice was low, whispering a secret. “I think he’s embarrassed by them —their cheeks are too ruddy, or they look too much like their dogs.” I stared at her, shocked, until she laughed and I realised she was joking.”
― Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange: A Novel

“Are you superstitious?’ This time I must have said it aloud, because he answers. ‘Black cats and rabbits’ feet?’ ‘That sort of thing,’ I say, and he leans in further to listen. ‘White cows and butterflies, field mice and hares. I saw a hare once in the library at Lyntons.’ Victor tenses, hopeful for a net that he can use to save me. A child’s net on a stick that he can thrust into the rushing water where I spin and turn in the eddies. He would scoop me out if he could. But there’s nothing now that will stop me flowing downstream with the current. Soon I’ll reach the falls and be swept over the brink, and that will be the end of me.”
― Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange

“Best let hidden things remain hidden, I should have said. Sleeping dogs and all that. If I was then the woman I am now I would have shouted and stood between the sledgehammer and the door that day, when Peter opened the Museum.”
― Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange