The Bass Rock Quotes

“It is just like my mother to tell me about a ghost in the house in which I am staying, alone, and then to tell me that there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. That is exactly her game.”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“Maggie is trancelike. ‘What would it take?’ she says. ‘What if all the women that have been killed by men through history were visible to us, all at once? If we could see them lying there. What if you could project a hologram of the bodies in the places they were killed?”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“Joseph recalls his mother who was “mad and screaming like birds were sewn under her skin”.”
― Evie Wyld, Bass Rock

“Do you ever scare yourself? Do you ever look at yourself in the mirror for such a long time that you start to see something else? Like there's someone else under the skin. Have you ever looked in the mirror and deliberately made an ugly face, bared your teeth, growled and snarled and become suddenly aware that there is something else inside of you that you're not letting out? Like we're the wolves and that's why we're hunted?”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“Something more than disgust wells up in me. Something else, disappointment run through with nails.”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“I trust a man who golfs less than a man who pays for sex.”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“Tell me something,’ she said to them or to the dove or to the trees – she wasn’t sure – ‘tell me what to do next.”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“My mother has found being alone a new beginning. Her house is tidy. She eats what she wants, when she wants: nothing for a day and then a dressed crab at eleven at night, or a bowl of frozen peas, uncooked, which she eats like peanuts for breakfast. I admire the singleness that she has embraced since Dad died. I think I could aspire to that, but without having to be widowed first. Sometimes, though, it would be nice to fuck and to be fucked.”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“... I can see there are people in the kitchen with us, there are children and women, all holding hands like us, and I wonder, is this the ghost everyone sees, is it in fact a hundred thousand different ghosts? It's only possible to focus on one at a time. They spill out of the doorway, and I see through the wall that they fill the house top to bottom, they are locked in wardrobes, they are under the floorboards, they crowd out of the back door and into the garden, they are on the golf course and on the beach and their heads bob out of the sea, and when we walk, we are walking right through them. The birds on the Bass Rock, they full it, they are replaced by more, their numbers do not diminish with time, they nest on the bones of the dead.”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“The wedding had been a situation they did not want to repeat, Elspeth’s mother Judith sobbing openly during the vows, Ruth’s own mother with not a shred of sympathy – she had lost her only son after all, which was surely worse than losing a daughter”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“Darling Puss. Darling Puss, men just are, that’s the truth of it. They are made differently, they want different things. And in order to be able to enjoy your life there are certain things that one has to accept. It’s not being deluded, I won’t have that – it’s seeing things for what they really are, and buggering on until eventually the penny drops and you find yourself living a very fruitful life partly with them but partly with yourself. And the great thing is, they almost always die first.”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“These things happened in every girl’s life at some point, of course – with Ruth it had been the curate, and he had only wrestled a fondle and a wet mouth out of her. But the hope was always that one’s parents were oblivious and remained that way.”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“Not having a husband to look after is quite the most intelligent thing your sister has ever done,’ she says of me, to Katherine. ‘And quite the most exciting thing you’ve done for yourself in a very long time.’ We both stand in silence waiting for the subject to be done with. Sometimes she can sound a little relieved to be widowed.”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“it’s just a feeling I have all the time that I’m walking in and out of these deaths and I should at least notice. I should notice because I’m not dead yet, and there’s no difference between these women and me, or you or your mother or the lady in the tea shop. We’re just breezing in and out of the death zone. Wading through the dead.”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“Maggie is trancelike. ‘What would it take?’ she says. ‘What if all the women that have been killed by men through history were visible to us, all at once? If we could see them lying there. What if you could”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“I do not fucking taste like peaches...I taste of soil and salt and the mutherfucking ocean. The fucking depths of the darkest parts of the ocean with the oil slicks and the scaled fish and the mutherfucking sea scorpions. That's what I taste of. And sometimes, beetroot.”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“At four in the morning I am tired enough to sleep. I have not drunk an appalling amount, and that is something. It’s not a good feeling turning out the lights and leaving the kitchen; the rest of the house gapes about me. I slide into bed, remembering once I’m in that I haven’t brushed my teeth. I let myself off that particular chore. I switch off the light and, though the room is in absolute darkness, I get out of bed again and turn the bear to face the wall, because it stops me from sleeping.”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

“If I were a woman, I would give men a wide berth. I've always rather fancied the idea of being a lesbian." He says it wistfully as though he had simply taken the wrong career path.”
― Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock