The Island Home Quotes

“It’s a city I’ve lived in for years, but a place where I’ve never made a network of friends or found a sense of really belonging. I can see now that it’s my own fault – I built walls around myself in an attempt to protect myself and my daughter. Maybe those walls kept some pain out but they also shut out joy. This is the place and the life I chose, but this summer has shown me how small my life here has been. How small my entire life has become.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“That my parents were not incapable of love, I was just unlovable.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“She nods and I realise how refreshing it is to speak to this woman who grew up with my husband. She may not have seen him in years but she knows him in a way that perhaps no one else does. That’s just the way with siblings. They are with you throughout those pivotal moments that shape you into the person you will eventually become. I don’t think that thread can ever really be broken, not completely.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“but I never really felt comfortable leaving Molly alone with them even if I couldn’t have told you in words exactly why – it was more a lingering sense of unease, a feeling of wanting to hold my daughter tightly to me whenever we were around them. But despite”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“She was close to tears and I felt that old guilt and sadness rip through me – that I haven’t been able to give my daughter more. So many times, I’ve pictured a different kind of life for her. A life full of people: grandparents, cousins, siblings maybe, a father.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“Mallachy has given me so many unexpected wonderful moments over the past few weeks, moments when I’ve forgotten everything else and just let myself sink into happiness. But perhaps most of all, he gave me this.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“My father had probably got himself into no fit state to leave the house and my mother would never have come on her own. I remember how disappointed I felt that they hadn’t been there, if not for me then for my brother, who was still small for his age and who shook when he collected his own prize from Mrs Brown, for science.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“I want to tell her that those moments cycling with her were some of the happiest of my childhood, that I think about them all the time. But despite her smile, I think perhaps we’re not there yet.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“Fine,’ he says. ‘I cared for them for years, I looked after them when they were dying. But fine, come and help at the house. I’ll be going over there in a couple of days.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“Since marrying Jack, I have never once spent Christmas away from the island. Whenever I argued for us to take up offers from my sisters to stay with them he always feigned needing to stay and keep up the farm, but I knew that really, he didn’t want to deal with the consequences of going against his parents.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“How dare you!’ my father shouted. ‘Lying to us, running around the island like a spoilt brat, giving our neighbours every reason to think what they already do – that you’re out of control.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“The salty tang catches in the back of my throat, its familiarity even after all these years grabbing me in the stomach and twisting like a knot being tightened.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“At least I have Molly. That’s what I’ve always tried to tell myself. It feels greedy to want more when I have her. She has been the biggest joy in my life. And I guess when I started to realise that the big family I’d imagined might never exist I just tried to love her as much as four children.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“understand,’ she says through her tears. ‘After everything you went through, of course you wanted to leave. But I just don’t understand why you didn’t keep in touch. We were best friends. For ages I wondered what I’d done wrong. I thought I didn’t matter to you.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“And for a while after leaving the island I would still have described myself as an artist, even when I was working in a bar and hadn’t touched a paintbrush in a long time.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home

“just enough money to buy our flat from the council, although each month I still feel the same panic that I might not be able to meet my mortgage payment. I always do manage it but the fear is still there, as familiar by now as the sound of my own breath. I’ve always been anxious about money. Because if something happens – if I get sick or the boiler breaks or I suddenly need something important for Ella, there’s no one to bail us out.”
― Libby Page, The Island Home