The Skeleton Key Quotes

“Bindra strikes me as the type to dot all her Is and cross all her Ts and then check everyone else’s grammar as well.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“But that’s what coming home means, doesn’t it? You’re always going to be who you were then.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“I look my brother up and down: he’s the right size and shape, but is only the outline of the person I thought he was. ‘You are the biggest disappointment of them all.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“I wait for the tidal wave of hurt but there’s nothing there, although I find that I care desperately about destroying this cushion.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“I’ve spent so long trying to be this perfect kid so you’d like me, all the cooking and the cycling and getting good grades and just living up to what you want me to be, and now you know what I’m really like.’ She’s crying so hard she can’t string more than a couple of words together, snatching what she can with each ragged breath. ‘You know – that I’m – salty and – violent and – mean – and who’d – want – someone – like – meeee?’ I sit next to her on the bed. ‘I want you. The angry and mean bits only make me love you more.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“I might not make anything of my life, but I’m going to do the right thing by people. I’m never going to do anything like what he did to me.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“I try not define myself against either of my parents, to be honest.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“Is that a fashion hole or a poverty hole?’ I follow his gaze to my knee. ‘It’s a laziness hole. I ripped them going through Enfield lock and I can’t be arsed to replace them.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“It is in observation and contemplation that art truly comes alive.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“The pen is not mightier than the sword but perhaps the paintbrush is interchangeable with the blade, and the list of great men who understood this is long.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“The problem with raising strong women is that they make formidable opponents.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“The grown-ups never understood that she wasn't good - she wasn't there.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“Cora's eyes are full of what makes a human. Fear and hurt and love and panic suspended in water and jelly and protein.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“The problem with growing up in a house where conventional morals were dismissed as bourgeois and suburban is that you have to make your own.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“In a family where everyone is judged by the art they create, it's nice to spend time with someone whose job is just what they do all day, not an expression of their soul.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“I know my way around the internet as well as most women in their mid-forties, which is to say, I'm on it all day but mystified by what happens 'backstage'.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“I am part of the first generation of women who can really truly have financial independence and choose whom I marry and choose if and when I have children and somehow I have ended up here, playing second fiddle to a man whose idea of good art is to flaunt his adultery.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“there's comfort to be had, because no one outside my family - maybe no one inside it, not really - has ever loved me so much that my pain became theirs.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“He doesn’t think about Rose, ever. He feels her, all day long. She is a feeling that is extraordinary, but so ever-present that he takes it for granted. To notice it would be like noticing blinking or swallowing.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“I start panicking, the way you do when you walk through customs knowing you haven’t got a kilo of coke in your hand luggage but what if you have? I find myself thinking, what would an innocent person say here? even though I am innocent.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key

“The suggestion presumes that there are moments when Rose is not on Dominic’s mind. That he makes a conscious decision to think about her, when she is in fact his default setting. Actually? He doesn’t think about Rose, ever. He feels her, all day long. She is a feeling that is extraordinary, but so ever-present that he takes it for granted. To notice it would be like noticing blinking or swallowing.”
― Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key