When We Were Silent Quotes

“The body remembers everything the mind wants to forget.”
― Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent

“In the end, we're the ones who have to live with the stories we tell ourselves.”
― Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent

“For years, I tried not to think about Highfield Manor. The pompous rise of its granite walls, the secrets hidden in its stone-cold shadows. The dark veil of cedars shrouding the school from the outside world. But still the memories fester in me, real as a disease.”
― Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent

“A different time. The era of synth pop and mixtapes, hair gel and new wave. Of Prince and paramilitaries, Madonna and moving statues. Magdalene laundries, the Eighth Amendment, bodies as battlegrounds—pig slit and gaping. Different but the same. Absolution for the guilty but not for us.”
― Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent

“That in-between time that's not concerned with the past or the future, only an infinite present that stretches ahead like those days of summer that merge into night. When the tape in my Walkman decides my persona and I'm taken so far away from myself I don't care if it's grief or joy that surges my heart.”
― Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent

“I'm not here for prestige. I'm here for revenge.”
― Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent

“The internet in 2009 was a much more innocent and trusting place. A time of social networks instead of social media, when people wanted to connect rather than broadcast.”
― Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent

“Wayback Machine, an online archive that has been saving internet data for decades.”
― Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent

“What lingers is the feeling of
coming face-to-face with a life so loosely tethered to a body and knowing
that you hold the final thread.”
― Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent

“That was always the one thing Highfield
valued more than grades, more than silverware or celebrity alumni: silence.”
― Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent