The Half Life of Valery K Quotes

“Guilt like that, it's a sort of arrogance, you know? An assumption that everything is your own fault when that's clearly absurd.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Half Life of Valery K

“He thought wearily that he had better recruit some women. Women didn't do stupid thing just to prove they were really good at being women.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Half Life of Valery K

“The way to not sink into self-pity and despair – the way to not die – was to look forward to things. Anything; the tinier the better, because then you were more likely to get it. The patterns of ice on the water barrels, the feeling of holding a hot mug. Anything to stop the onset of the terrible docility that came before you gave up. Collect enough bright things, and it was possible to have a good day.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Half Life of Valery K

“You stop, and you turn back into stars. Mum says everyone’s made of stars. Is that true?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, and liked Anna even more than before. ‘All matter is forged by nuclear fusion reactions in the hearts of stars. They take hydrogen atoms, which are the littlest bits of the stuff the world is made of, and they bolt them together into bigger and bigger atoms – helium, oxygen, carbon, everything. All the atoms that make you. You’re star dust.’ She looked pleased with that. ‘And then when my atoms have finished being me, they go off back to the stars?’ ‘Some of them will be rain, some will be earth, some will float away and light up when the solar wind comes, and that makes the aurora. And like you say, some of them will find their way back into a star.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Half Life of Valery K

“Every single person he had known at the camp had talked about trying to go home one day. He had too. It had never occurred to him that there would be no home to go back to. This wasn't his Moscow. He felt indignant that no one had broken it to him beforehand. People were supposed to tell you. They didn't just let you trip over your dead father on the pavement one day and say, oh, that's right, old Tanya had too much to drink a few years ago, we forgot to say.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Half Life of Valery K

“Shenkov nodded. It was difficult. If you got it wrong and one of the kids reported something you’d said that wasn’t quite bang on key with current Marxist–Leninist theory, someone came along to revoke your communication privileges. But Anna was clever. The kids liked her, that was the important thing; people rarely informed on someone they liked. She would be fine.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Half Life of Valery K