The Porpoise Quotes

“Perhaps this is what all prayer is, when the ceremony and the theology are peeled away, a serious stillness in which one talks quietly to one’s own best self.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise

“She has grown up as a woman. She has been taught to flatter, to please, to depend, to give way, to make herself small and quiet. She has been told to be soft so that men will always have a means by which they can hurt and control her, that ring through the nose which men call femininity. But she has silently refused to accept these lessons.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise

“He does not understand yet that sometimes the monster is other people, sometimes the monster squats unseen inside one’s own heart, and sometimes the monster is the brute fact of time itself.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise

“Poetry scares her, with its glimpses of the abyss between the slats of the swaying bridge.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise

“Depending on yet more men seems to her like part of the problem. Better to rely on their own invisibility. A memory of that deer standing on the path then sprinting away. The sisterhood of idiot creatures, the wisdom that comes with knowing you could be prey.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise

“Poate ca rugaciunea nici nu este altceva, atunci cand ceremonialul si teologia sunt lasate deoparte: o nemiscare sobra, in care omul isi vorbeste, aproape in tacere, siesi.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise

“Poate ca rugaciunea nici nu este altceva, atunci cand ceremonialul si teologia sunt lasate departe: o nemiscare sobra, in care omul isi vorbeste, aproape in tacere, siesi.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise

“The boy with red hair, who loved the picture of the bear, puts on as gruff as a voice as he can and quietly asks the boy holding bird if he can have it. It is as beautiful as the picture of the bear, if not more so. The boy holding the bird looks at him, smelling weakness and need. He turns and hurls the bird as far as he can into the sea. The boy with red hair nods and bites his lip and tries not to cry.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise

“But what is the answer? Armed guards? Depending on yet more men seems to her like part of the problem. Better to rely on their own invisibility. A memory of that deer standing on the path then sprinting away. The sisterhood of idiot creatures, the wisdom that comes with knowing you could be prey.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise

“He no longer believes in the gods. He has heard too many contradictory stories on his travels. Better, surely, that everyone is deluded than that revelation has been so parsimoniously handed out. If he has a religion it is that of grass and rivers, of mountains and of skies that continue beyond the ends even of our longest journeys.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise

“He has never believed in the Fates. You shape your own life, you see the available futures laid out before you and you choose the most advantageous. He can see now that this is a delusion from which you suffer when the path chosen for you is a profitable one. When the path veers into darker, more difficult terrain you finally understand that what you thought was weakness in others is not weakness at all; it is simply the structure of the world.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise

“He can see now that this is a delusion from which you suffer when the path chosen for you is a profitable one. When the path veers into darker, more difficult terrain you finally understand that what you thought was weakness in others is not weakness at all; it is simply the structure of the world.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise

“And being listened to by someone held in such high esteem, by someone not quite of this world, makes them feel a little stronger, a little more in harmony with a discordant world, a little more able to solve their own problems without divine intercession. Most go away thinking they have been given wise advice which in truth they have told themselves. Perhaps this is what all prayer is, when the ceremony and the theology are peeled away, a serious stillness in which one talks quietly to one’s own best self.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise

“The future is terrifying. Marina must find a world in which everyone is a stranger then invent a life from nothing. She is a teenage girl. She has read enough to know what happens to teenage girls who are not protected by stronger, older men. But this is life. She sees that now. Every one of those cows will have its throat cut. The falcon will tear the pigeon apart. Chained women will be dragged from captured cities...Golden bowls and leather-bound books are palliatives and distractions. The lucky ones are those who die young and swiftly and in ignorance.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise

“Mama is thirty-seven weeks pregnant.”
― Mark Haddon, The Porpoise