Strange Flowers Quotes

“Is this how you know you’re in love? This absence of pretence?”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers

“Kids should be fat, she says. Filled with sugar and kindness and love. If I have kids they’re going to be enormous. I’ll stuff them full of everything they want.”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers

“Alexander felt a clicking into place of things, a feeling that all the strange unexpected things that had happened to him had been moved into alignment by some benevolent all-knowing force, that this small stone building on the land of a rich man in the company of a poor man was exactly where he was meant to be, that his life was unfolding, slowly, strangely, exactly as it should.”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers

“he wondered at how life could be a certain way one minute and a different way altogether the next with no effort at all from the person whose life it was.”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers

“a sense of something monumental and precipitous, some great shifting of the axis of his little world, so that every angle and aspect would change.”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers

“Time is relentless, though, and heartless, and it insists on its own propagation, its own terrible replication of itself, moment after moment after moment. And just as relentless are the things that fill it, the bits and pieces that all put together add up to existence, to a life, all the big things that take up the greater part of the mind, and all the small things that sit waiting in the back of the mind, things that can’t be ignored or left undone:”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers

“at least an absence is an invisible thing, a thing that can’t be touched, and therefore pristine and incorruptible, holy almost”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers

“they felt on their shoulders the terrible weight of all the things about the world they didn’t know.”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers

“Moll had been their mid-life miracle, their smile from God,”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers

“Moll Gladney was either pregnant or dead, and it was hard to know which one of those was worse.”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers

“the small drama was absorbed quickly into the village’s store of small dramas, another of those things to be remembered now and then, reminisced about, sighed over.”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers

“that was the kind of wondering that a busman kept to himself, the unasked questions that filled his days.”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers

“him”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers

“and questions presented themselves to the front of their minds in ragged jostling queues and were turned one by one away before they could be voiced;”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers