Wild Geese Quotes

“Dolly is a ten-year-old bichon frise. Her fur smells like bran flakes and her breath smells like rotting flesh. Most of the time she’s a languid, trip-over dog, a little cat of a dog, though in her usual stance, splayed sideways on the floor, she looks more like a baby polar bear. She came with the flat and has a greater claim to its ownership than I do.”
― Soula Emmanuel, Wild Geese

“Perhaps I am doomed to have sillier and sillier identity crises until I am dead: the one label that accepts no backchat. Paralysis by analysis begetting paralysis the old-fashioned way.”
― Soula Emmanuel, Wild Geese

“The surest sign that pain has been fully felt is when nothing is taken seriously at all.”
― Soula Emmanuel, Wild Geese

“A person is always collective: you have to hold them severally.”
― Soula Emmanuel, Wild Geese

“I am thirty years old and living in postscript already, not on the edge but over it, a happenstance life on a tranquil margin. It is a gatecrasher’s quiet. I cannot explain what a thrill it is just to be here.”
― Soula Emmanuel, Wild Geese

“I try to hurry the encounter along in the manner of a French oral exam, stammering through the procedurals of a regulation rendezvous in the hope of disembarking promptly at au revoir.”
― Soula Emmanuel, Wild Geese

“Grace and I had the kind of relationship that might have made other women jealous – I appeared happy to exist in her shadow. We always went where she wanted: bad comedy sets, bad poetry recitals, bad concerts by posh, sweaty men who subsequently developed a reputation for grooming
schoolgirls.
I was content to make room for her, to be a worthy and dutiful addendum to someone else’s life. There was something refreshing, perhaps even feminist about my turmoil. How good I was, how nice I was – I was so nice, it was almost unbelievable. I was the perfect man.”
― Soula Emmanuel, Wild Geese

“The worst thing about looking back is seeing all that wasteful embarrassment surrounding you like the polystyrene foam of early adulthood, weightless and toxic. Wanting to go
back and explain that you’ll always be like this, so you might as well make the best of it. You are both more and less interesting than you think. Your sadness is not a virtue. Stop wanting to be someone else and resolve to be your own febrile self.”
― Soula Emmanuel, Wild Geese