The Last Kiss Quotes

“Because Harry knew there was no forever. Not for them. Such things were impossible. There was only today, there was only tonight. And he’d do well not to forget it.”
― Sally Malcolm, The Last Kiss

“The thought of squeezing back into his stifling pre-war life stopped his breath in panic. In truth, the only time he breathed easily was with Harry, whom he loved with that same red raw ferocity — and whom he’d love with passion given the chance. But he wouldn’t get that chance. The world forbade it.”
― Sally Malcolm, The Last Kiss

“he couldn’t be idle for the rest of his life. It was just that the thought of sitting in Pollock’s offices for the next thirty years was crushing. After the vivid horrors and joys of the front, how could he go back to that monochrome life?”
― Sally Malcolm, The Last Kiss

“Now, back in society’s straitjacket, those feelings were seeking new expression and his body was coming alive in ways he’d not had time for at the front. Standing with Harry in the paddock, practically in his arms, had felt like standing on the cusp of something irrevocable.”
― Sally Malcolm, The Last Kiss

“have a purpose here,” she said as she walked around the car to help him out. “I can use my mind and I’m respected for it and — Oh, Ashleigh, you can’t possibly imagine how that feels when you’ve never felt anything like it in your life.”
― Sally Malcolm, The Last Kiss

“Different lenses, West had called it, the way they’d seen mankind stripped bare, down to its bloody bones. Private or general, illiterate or scholar, honest British tommy or young Indian jawan — they’d all lived and died the same in the end, equally possessed of brutality and compassion, of love and hate. Of pity. Of blood. Just men clinging to their humanity and finding joy in each other, in scarlet bursts of friendship as bright and unexpected as the poppies that bloomed among the dead.”
― Sally Malcolm, The Last Kiss

“His father gave a small nod. Happier, no doubt, now West was in his proper place and not threatening to take a seat at the dining table. But the iniquity irritated like lice under his shirt and provoked a hot flare of anger. As if the man who’d shared every privation, every joy, every danger at the front, the man who’d carried him to safety on his back, wasn’t fit to sit at his table. Incomprehensible, all of it. Maddening. It”
― Sally Malcolm, The Last Kiss

“And yet he’d never been closer to another man in his life, would never be again. He felt with absolute certainty that their profound bond, forged in the hellish crucible of war, was inimitable. Never to be repeated and never to be forgotten. Christ, but he missed Harry West more than he missed his damned leg.”
― Sally Malcolm, The Last Kiss

“The London fogs continued as soupy as ever, made uncanny by the masks people had taken to wearing — some to keep out the influenza, others to hide horrific souvenirs from the fighting.”
― Sally Malcolm, The Last Kiss

“He didn’t promise to always be there. Whatever Ash might think, Harry knew it was impossible. And there was no point in wishing for impossible things.”
― Sally Malcolm, The Last Kiss

“Kinder?” Ash snorted. “Easier, you mean. Wrap it all in King and Country and forget what war really is. It betrays them, it betrays everyone who died.”
― Sally Malcolm, The Last Kiss

“Harry, who meant the world to him, and who the world would deny him. Harry, whom he loved.”
― Sally Malcolm, The Last Kiss

“I’m hoping to do more than see it, mate.”
― Sally Malcolm, The Last Kiss