Soldier Sailor Quotes

“Eat it, smoke it, stay up all night for it because the memories of the damage you wreak upon your body when you are young will sustain your spirit when you are old.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“I tell my husband about my childhood and he tells me about his but it isn't the same. We can never know each other as we were then. But I know you. I will see the child you were in the man you will become. So come to me. When you need me, come. When you are lost, when are you low: come. When the birds have stopped singing, or you have stopped hearing, because they never stop singing. They are birds.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“Here's my ennobling truth, Sailor: women risk death to give life to their babies. They endure excruciating pain, their inner parts torn, then they pick themselves up no matter what state they are in, no matter how much blood they've lost, and they tend to their infants… Tell me, men: when were you last split open from the inside?”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“Do you know what I would do for you? I hope not. What would I not do, is the question. The universe careens around us and I shield your sleeping body with my arms, ready to proclaim to the heavens that I would kill for you: that I would kill others for you, that I would kill myself. I would even kill my husband if it came down to it. I swear every woman in my position feels the same.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“I laughed and then we were doing that thing again, our thing: laughing into one another's eyes. All that time I had thought I was jollying you along when all that time you were jollying along me.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“There is always an idealized image in my head of how a thing will be, but it never matches up to the reality. You are the sole exception.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“When you have a pot belly and I have whiskers. When you are stooped and I am buckled. When it’s a Beckett play. When you wear beige anoraks and I wear bed jackets. Permanently, that is. When I am permanently wearing a bed jacket because I am permanently in a bed, and you are on the visitor’s chair listening to me witter on, and on, I will know When you are on statins and I am too bewildered to understand that this middle-aged man is my baby. —Oh, Time is coming for us, Sailor. Time will do us in— You hardly know what time is But soon you’ll find out. This nice middle-aged man whom I may or may not recognise. Because my mind may be mush by then. Mush like the food they spoon into me. I will still look at you and know Somehow”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“We all go bustling about, pushing shopping trolleys or whatever, acting like love of this voltage is normal; domestic, even. That we know how to handle it. But I don’t.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“I encountered an army of mothers at pick-up outside the school that I was sussing out for you the other day. They appeared from several directions at once—around corners, down streets, out of cars. Like zombies, was my first thought as I watched them gravitate towards the school gates. Some of them were pushing buggies, others wheeled scooters, one woman carried a teddy bear. It would be a mistake to assume that because of the soft toy the woman herself was soft. The women carrying teddy bears are the most dangerous of them all. They would kill to protect the owners of those bears. Sailor, I have been that soldier. I stepped back to allow them to pass. These women were not zombies: they were warriors. Nothing would have stopped them. Nothing would get in their way. Marching to the summons of the school bell, catching the children who ran into their arms. Standing over their young until their young were ready to stand alone. Only then would the warriors stand down. The reason this work is considered unchallenging is that women mainly do it.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“When you’re up there at the podium, accepting your Nobel or whatever, I will know “I would like to thank my mother,” you had better say. I have the sticker still, by the way. BRILLIANT! Which I’m not and, chances are, neither are you. You might be David Bowie though he’s a once-off. You may discover the cure for cancer but it’s a long shot. Maybe you’ll arrest climate change. Someone had better, and fast. The likelihood is you’ll be another working stiff in a sea of working stiffs. The world needs working stiffs. If you are one such stiff, I will know Cannot unknow My grandmother in her nineties, dementia, crying out for the baby, the baby, oh God where’s the baby. I get it now. The magnitude. She couldn’t unknow either.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“From the outside a woman cradling a newborn looks peaceful. A new mother is not peaceful but in a jittery state of high alert. We declare her serene so we can leave her to it. So we can behold the glittering surface, remark on its beauty, and walk away.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“I knelt down to pick up the hatchling to . . . . what? Give it back to its mother? Here is your dying chick? Just before I made contact with it, she dive-bombed me. The mother actually dive-bombed me. I sat back on my hunkers in surprise and admiration. So slight, so drab, so courageous. She put me to shame. I stood up and backed off and she alighted in front of her young, setting herself and her pattering heart between us.
Babies die, I thought as I regarded her. That is the world we live in.
I did not make this world.
If I could, I thought, I would make a different world. I would make a different world for you and me, Sailor. And for this brave bird.
But I can't.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“Hadn't thought about death until I had you. A door opened when you entered my life and that door goes two ways. A baby was placed in the crook of my arm, and a skull on my open palm as I was crowned a mother. Here is your baby. One day you will lose him. He will lose you. You will all lose each other, and he never called her Mama again.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“I am tired. I am lonely. I have found myself mired in resentment in this new life, become a person I don't wish to be, feeling constant guilt for not feeling constant gratitude for the blessing that is my child. I do feel constant gratitude: I adore my child. But I am tired. I am lonely. I am lost.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“Valerian, campion, speedwell, vetch. There are gentle things in this world. Gentle but resilient. Be one of them, Sailor.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“When you were born, you didn’t enter my world: I entered yours. I crawled through the small door that had appeared in the wall and there you were, oh my God, perfect. It took me some time to realise your father was no longer with us, not quite. He was there in the beginning but at some point wandered off, stepping out to make a phone call from which he never fully hung up, popping his head in from time to time to see how we were doing, would we like a cup of tea? It was just you and me on our own in there for a while, and then it was you and me and other infants and their carers. Then one day I noticed a man surrounded by things that were too small for him, things he tripped over or snapped in two with his clumsy male strength, a man soothing tears, a man kissing boo-boos better, a man being—I almost said—a woman.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“That morning had been so beautiful I was afraid of squandering it. Some day you might know what I mean. April, a tumult of tender new growth after the long hard slog of winter. The imperative to get my fill of summer before it ended although it had not yet begun. To get my fix of whatever it was I thought I needed so badly in my life, that thing, that maddening thing, that was missing. When I look back on my own childhood I see summer days, but when I look back on yours I feel cold.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“We crossed to the sea wall. It was a clear night, very beautiful, very still - you will not remember it. I took a photo to file away for the auditor who will one day decree whether I gave you a happy childhood or not, but it came out black. I like to think the image is tucked away in your mind, though, informing the man you will one day become. This is what I like to think: that it's all there, or not all of it, just the good stuff - the midsummer stars as keen as anything, the moon gilding the waves silver, the horizon a dark expanse, the world before man. The lack of bearings took down my fever too, Sailor, which was a different type of fever altogether, a fever which on one level I hope you don't inherit, and on another I pray you do, it being the fever that makes life interesting. I felt good, little Sailor, I felt like myself. I started singing to you, not because I can sing, but despite the fact that I can't.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“I always knew that, as the mother, I would get the blame for everything.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“Hated cling film. Hated it more than I hated kinetic sand. Defeated by something that lacked a third dimension. While I'd been off tinkering on the cerebral plane, the smart money has been mastering its dark art. If you don't keep up with technology, it bypasses you, Sailor, but if you don't keep up with its opposite, the manual realm, it bypasses you just as surely and suddenly, there you are, a creature overtaken by evolution, obsolete, baying at the shoreline.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor