Cunning Folk Quotes

“I’ve never seen a soul here. No one shows themselves in the dismal wet fields, patchworked into sections by wire fences. No one toils behind the tufted vestiges of hedgerow. Few birds mark the sky beside the desultory spectre of a crow. As for trees, only spindly copses sprout on higher ground, shorn or shattered into piteous last stands; the woods have been whittled skeletal behind the wire of internment camps, to make room for more empty fields. And cement barns. Telegraph poles. Litter in the roadside ditches. Burst animals on tarmac, smeared, further compressed. Denatured land. Denuded. Scrub grubbed out, scraped away. Ugly and too neat. Empty. Industrial even. Blasted. Nowhere for anything to nest, take root, hide. Green but made desolate by the impact of the nearest settlement’s conquest. These are factory-farmed lowlands orbiting a city. A ring of ice encircling a blackened planet.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“Believed they could just buy a fallen house at auction, paint a few walls and live happily ever after. He’s tempted to roar with laughter at his delusions, until he suffocates.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“Passing from the dusty house and packing crates, paint stink, the blurting radio and Daddy’s grinding tools to enter this wood reminds her of walking off a beach covered in people and into the sea. Behind her the world hushes. Cool air softly washes her skin.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“What was he thinking? Fiona’s been tearful for a week and is more forlorn than he’s ever seen her. The strain of it all. They live next door to cunts.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“Not being able to see the house anymore makes her tummy busy with the fizz of drinks in cans. Around her bum there’s tingling like before a poo she really needs. But she’ll only go a bit further. One more corner.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“Her tummy prickles. Magic lives in this wood. In the distance there will be dens and clearings and treehouses and narrow paths of golden light guarded by singing birds. Foxes, rabbits, badgers, maybe lions that have escaped from safari parks live here too. She feels small and frightened and excited in the way that makes her want to wee.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“There is no going back. The decision made, forced across the line by him during frantic months when they were wracked by excitement and fatigue in equal measure, while escorted by numerous estate agents around cramped flats and ex-council properties with lawns like thickets.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“Somehow, owning a home and no longer renting from the negligent and unscrupulous while living in a state of perpetual compromise and dissatisfaction, had been the hardest thing of all to achieve. Because, money.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“His disbelief. His failure to acknowledge the enormity of this moment in their new life that is soon to start in their own home. One they own. Theirs. Home. The word has not carried such power since his own childhood. Tom doesn’t feel like himself today and imagines a new persona is required to match his newly acquired status of home-owner. Only he doesn’t know what the role demands. Now he has the keys and deeds to the house, he feels as if he has stepped out of a murky room, in which his anxiety obscured every feature and detail. A room he was waiting to leave for a long time. A confined space he’d rented that belonged to someone else. A landlord who might tell him to leave at any time, or charge him even more for occupying the room’s dismal confines. And yet the restless, impatient feeling of waiting to leave that room has also continued into this morning, as if he has only succeeded in stepping into another similar room, in which his anxiety will obscure every feature and detail. All over again. Surely, he’ll adjust in time. But, right now, the title of home-owner is incongruous. Comparisons with other life-changing experiences of his past are a poor fit but are all he has to go on.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“She’d charted a new course in his life; one much better than the route he’d floundered upon alone.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“The precious money Fiona’s mum gifted them as a housewarming gift, and more than they believed she had tucked away, is just enough to pay a plumber to fit a new boiler and replace the pipes in the kitchen and bathroom that make the sounds of a submarine running aground. A home-improvement loan, through the bank where Fiona works, must cover the roof’s repair, or replacement, a new fuse-box and wiring. New windows will have to wait until they can afford them. When he’s got work coming in again. To remain buoyant, to keep his nose and mouth above the choppy surface of the deepest, most precarious waters he’s ever swum – the mortgage he can’t really afford on a house that needs everything doing to it – his focus must remain upon one task at a time. One room and then another. Or he will be consumed, will drown. He knows this and tells himself this fact over and over.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“Exactly when they pass from the bleak to the fecund isn’t clear. The B road narrows and some oak branches drape the road for a stretch, darkening the interior of the cab. The route then dips, veers west. A turn, a steep ascent later and the outlook changes. Even Gracey is distracted by the carousel of shadow and sunlight upon a wilder earth and upon the windscreen. Not so flat here either. Hills ruffle the skyline and contour the land with smooth undulations. Patches of trees extend into actual woods that you can’t see the far side of from the nearest edge. A buzzard hovers. Then another. Wood pigeons flap for cover beneath them. Tonal shifts emerge. Varieties of cereal crops occult the liverish earth, combed by giants. Odd hay meadows are pebble-dashed with pastel. Hedgerows thicken to spike outwards and suggest internal hoppings and buzzings of minute life. Ancient trees instil repose, austere sentinels drowsing in the corner of fields. Below their muscular branches mooch caramel cows patched with chocolate. Above the vista, the dusty sheets of ashen cloud break apart into cumulus, plump like white cotton. The distinction between back there and here startles Tom. As it did when he came here for the viewings”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“A vegetable sound of twisting fibres obliterates the silence of the hall.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“I’d warrant that one of the greatest horrors of all, for so many, will not be what you actually live, eat and sleep inside, and call home, but what lives next door to you. The neighbours.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“our homes are extremely important to us, in so many ways. Sometimes they may be all we have. We’ll probably spend most of our lives inside them; will sleep most of our sleep inside them; will spend much of our income on maintaining and improving and repairing them. Our children will grow up in them, and pets will mark their territories around them; our homes may also bring us close to penury and bankruptcy. We do life in them; we go through life in them. And, in a strange way, a home can become a mother to us when we’re older. Homes protect us.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“younger self recovered from a time when their anxiety for her safety was as fierce and blind as any madness.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“The sun is sinking and might have set the red and apricot sky on fire in places too far away to see.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“she extracts the immense pleasure that accompanies feeling sorry for one’s self after a fright, as well as a telling-off.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“Tom studies his daughter’s expression. Her questing eyes are framed by lashes as fine and soft as anything on the earth. They contain a vulnerability he finds near unbearable. The moment is fleeting but he feels that he only truly sees his daughter at bedtime and is granted glimpses into the wholeness of her. Once the chatter and antics subside and she rests, he is often struck by a breath-stealing recognition of the little person that he has created and must protect.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“Nothing she can recollect, until that moment in her life, has made her as furious.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“similar run of bad luck that dogged their predecessor, who swung from a light fitting within six months of buying the house.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“He can’t help comparing them to a family of peasants in a black and white film, who pray for morning while huddled in the corner of a hovel.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk

“The smell of cold earth tints her mind, colouring her thoughts darker as if her head is a jam jar filled with water for cleaning bristles and a paintbrush has been dipped inside.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk