Where I End Quotes

“Apparitions are scary but the real horror is to be found in people”
― Sophie White, Where I End

“I eventually did come out of the water and not a single second of my life has felt right since that moment. I’ve never felt right again. I can’t remember how it is to wake up without the terrible weight of absence”
― Sophie White, Where I End

“She tells me she draws and paints and stitches. She tells me that drawing and painting and stitching are just doing, that what makes something art is the intention behind it. If the intention is to communicate some intangible feeling or slippery truth that resists capture by words, then it is art”
― Sophie White, Where I End

“The island people are all cowed and crumbling, as though parts of the island have become dislodged and are moving about the place. Their heads are lumpen. At the front, eyes, nose and mouth are clustered together, huddled in the centre of the face. The chin and jaw reaches forward, jutting like the rocky outcrops that stretch into the water at the lower end of the island. Their chalky grey surface suggests no rush of life within. If I chipped at one, I imagine the organs would hang inside the hollow, fossilised. Even the children of the island are calcified. Their cries and laughter die in their throat”
― Sophie White, Where I End

“If she were not so empty, I would be full. I would be boiled pink with love like Rachel’s baby. Instead I am an echo.”
― Sophie White, Where I End

“The island is dark but the sea is dark too, though it is made of something else entirely. It is silky and each undulation and ripple is edged in what little shy lustre can be drawn down from the endless sky-hole above. The sea is dead, gilded with the dead light of dead stars and, because it sways and sings and chants, it feels alive, although it’s not. It is teeming with death and it is very, very beautiful.”
― Sophie White, Where I End

“Thing 2. I had children and felt the terror of my own power to destroy them.”
― Sophie White, Where I End

“That’s what a baby is, I’ve come to see now. It is the mother’s whole soul extracted,”
― Sophie White, Where I End

“(Hope, I’ve come to learn, can be a noose. When we hope, we willingly, blithely, put our heads in a sadistic coil and wait to be hanged. I hoped for things when I was younger—pathetic things—and was always left swinging.)”
― Sophie White, Where I End

“So, I can read and write. Through the books I learned about things I didn’t have and things I wouldn’t do. Some seemed unappealing. Jobs and exams and that. Other things were just baffling: the children in my books led lives of incomprehensible simplicity, lost balls in the park and new pets. I got a hold of the basics but, every month when Dada visited, I could see I was not doing it right. I became a mismatch. My body grew but my mind stayed small”
― Sophie White, Where I End