Ruth Ware Quotes

People don’t change,” Nina said bitterly. “They just get more punctilious about hiding their true selves.

A lie can outlast any truth.

My friend Erin says we all have demons inside us, voices that whisper we're no good, that if we don't make this promotion or ace that exam we'll reveal to the world exactly what kind of worthless sacks of skin and sinew we really are Maybe that's true. Maybe mine just have louder voices.

It was growing dark, and somehow the shadows made it feel as if all the trees had taken a collective step towards the house, edging in to shut out the sky.

I always thought that being self-sufficient was a strength, but now I realize it’s a kind of weakness, too.

There’s a reason why we keep thoughts inside our heads for the most part—they’re not safe to be let out in public.

You’re never an ex-addict, you’re just an addict who hasn’t had a fix in a while.

Maybe that was closer to the truth--we weren't captor and captive, but two animals in different compartments of the same cage. Hers was just slightly larger.

Some situations have no simple resolution; all we can do is steer the course that causes the least harm.

People do go mad, you know, if you stop them from sleeping for long enough...

It's not that Nina doesn't feel stuff. She just deals with it differently than most people. Sarcasm is her defense against life.

I jumped to a conclusion that was so wrong, it was almost completely right.

Because it was the lies that got me here in the first place. And I have to believe that it’s the truth that will get me out.

There was something strangely naked about it, like we were on a stage set, playing our parts to an audience of eyes out there in the wood.

Time healed, they said, but it wasn’t true, or not completely. The first raw wound of loss had closed and silvered over, yes, but the scar it had left would never heal. It would always be there, aching and tender.

we all have demons inside us, voices that whisper we’re no good, that if we don’t make this promotion or ace that exam we’ll reveal to the world exactly what kind of worthless sacks of skin and sinew we really are.

I hate being driven—driving is like karaoke—your own is epic, other people’s is just embarrassing or alarming.

One for sorrow Two for joy Three for a girl Four for a boy Five for silver Six for gold Seven for a secret Never to be told

You can’t influence fate, or change what’s out of your control. But you can choose what you yourself do with the cards you’re dealt.

A wall, after all, isn’t just about keeping others out. It can also be for trapping people inside.

The night was drawing in, and the house felt more and more like a glass cage, blasting its light blindly out into the dusk, like a lantern in the dark. I imagined a thousand moths circling and shivering, drawn inexorably to its glow, only to perish against the cold inhospitable glass.

There are days when I don’t hear a single human voice, apart from the radio, and you know what? I quite like that.

I know him by heart.

There was a little spritz of sequined leaves across the right shoulder because you didn’t seem to be able to get away with none. Apparently the majority of ball gowns were designed by five-year-old girls armed with glitter guns, but at least this one didn’t look entirely like an explosion in a Barbie factory.

The ghosts, she had sobbed. The ghosts wouldn’t like it.

The people who came to her booth were seeking meaning and control – but they were looking in the wrong place. When they gave themselves over to superstition, they were giving up on shaping their own destiny.

In books, a bad thing might happen on page 207, that was true. But it would always happen on page 207, no matter what. And when you reread, you could see it coming, watch out for the signs, prepare yourself.

I know what it's like. Don't you see? I know what she must have felt like, when someone came for her in the middle of the night. That's why I have to find out who did this to her.

Better to achieve perfect marks on an easy test than flunk a hard one, that was my motto.

You’d think people would be wary of spilling to a writer. You’d think they’d know that we’re essentially birds of carrion, picking over the corpses of dead affairs and forgotten arguments to recycle them in our work—zombie reincarnations of their former selves, stitched into a macabre new patchwork of our own devising. Tom,

How could it be right that some people had so much, while others had so little?

there’s one thing I dislike more than being hurt, it’s being seen to be hurt. I’ve

The cards do not predict the future. All thy can do is show us how a given situation may turn out, based on the energies we bring to the reading. Another day, another mood, a different set of energies, and the same question could have a completely different answer....We have free will. The answer the cards give can turn us in our path.

A lie. I'd almost forgotten how they feel on my tongue, slick and sickening.

you’re never alone in a room filled with a thousand books.

I would never sleep. I knew that. Not with my blood ringing in my ears, and my heart beating an angry staccato rhythm in my chest. I would never relax.

Here, in this house the ghosts of our past are real

I wanted to write in my diary—to do as I always do when things get too much—let it out onto the page, like a kind of bloodletting, letting the ink and paper soak up all the grief and anger and fear until I can cope again.

I close my eyes, listening to the sound of the past, imagining myself back into the skin of the girl I once was, a girl whose friends were still around her, whose mistakes were ahead of her......I am happy.

Never believe it, Hal. Never believe your own lies. Because superstition was a trap – that was what she had learned, in the years of plying her trade on the pier. Touching wood, crossing fingers, counting magpies – they were all lies, all of them. False promises designed to give the illusion of control and meaning in a world in which the only destiny came from yourself. You can't predict the future, Hal knew.

I love ports. I love the smell of tar and sea air, and the scream of the gulls. Maybe it's years of taking the ferry to France for summer holidays, but a harbor gives me a feeling of freedom in a way that an airport never does. Airports say work and security checks and delays. Ports say... I don't know. Something completely different. Escape, maybe.

It didn’t help that, unlike a ferry, there were no floor plans or maps, and minimal signage – supposed to help the impression that this was a private home that you just happened to share with a load of rich people.

Tina is one of those women who thinks every bit of estrogen in the boardroom is a threat to her own existence.

And like my dad always used to say, if work was meant to be fun, people wouldn’t pay you to do it.

Après moi, le déluge. . . .

When they gave themselves over to superstition, they were giving up on shaping their own destiny.

Apparently the majority of ball gowns were designed by five-year-old girls armed with glitter guns, but at least this one didn’t look entirely like an explosion in a Barbie factory. I

Was this what it was going to be like? Was I turning into someone who had panic attacks about walking home from the tube or staying the night alone in the house without their boyfriend? No, fuck that. I would not be that person.

There is no gray when you’re young. There’s only goodies and baddies, right and wrong. The rules are very clear—a playground morality of ethical lines drawn out like a netball pitch, with clear fouls and penalties.

In Topher's world, people are hard, polished shells, their shiny exteriors hiding the inadequacies and anxieties inside. But Topher made a mistake. He didn't understand that some people are the other way around. But Eva . . . I think Eva did understand that. And perhaps it's what killed her in the end.

To tell the truth we had a bit of a . . . disagreement, let’s call it. Before I left.” “Oh, right.” I kept my voice neutral. I never know what to say in these situations. I hate people prying into my business, so I assume others will feel the same way. But sometimes they want to spill, it seems, and then you look cold and odd, backing away from their confidences. I try to be completely nonjudgmental—not pushing for secrets, not repelling confessions. And in truth, although part of me really doesn’t want to hear their petty jealousies and weird obsessions, there’s another part of me that wants to egg them on. It’s that part of me that stands there nodding, taking notes, filing it all away.

It’s not just the snow; it’s a hundredweight of unwelcome memories bearing down on me.

What was going to happen to me? There were only two possibilities—they were going to let me go at some point. Or they were going to kill me.

There’s a disappointment in the banality of what makes people tick, but at the same time, there’s a kind of fascination at seeing the inner coils and cogs. The

So you write plays?” “Yes. I’m always rather jealous of novelists—the way you get to control everything. You don’t have to deal with actors massacring your best lines.

Yes. Yes, I take antidepressants. So what? No

have not spoken to him for ten years, but I thought of him every single day.

breath

And it’s a story about hope—about how we have to go on, after the unbearable has happened. Make the most of our lives, for the sake of the people who gave theirs.

And even in spite of my ovaries, I can remember a simple two-digit number.

Don’t let yourself get caught up in what-ifs. That way madness lies.

That’s the trouble with having a “click” as Mary Wren might call it. When you define yourself by walls, who’s in, who’s out. The people on the other side of the wall become, not just them, but them. The outsiders. The opposition. The enemy.

She had discovered that the most important truths often lay in what people didn’t say, and learned to read the secrets that they hid in plain sight, in their faces, and in their clothes, and in the expressions that flitted across their faces when they thought no one was watching.

And I am thinking about how, however much we struggled to be free, this is how it always ends, the four of us, skewered together by the past.

Part of the Lying Game was always to know when the game was up, when to bail out.

Here’s to us,” she said, holding the bottle high, the moonlight striking off the glass. “May we never grow old.

So having a routine is important. It gives you something to hang on to, something to differentiate the weekdays from the weekends. My day starts like this. At

Like an idiot I’d taken the bait, exploded on cue. It was done. “I’m

But I was almost certain—almost completely certain—that she was the woman in cabin 10.

But posting on Facebook is a false kind of intimacy, and in real life they haven’t seen or spoken to each other for a long time

She didn’t believe in anything mystical, but she did believe in the power of the cards to reveal something about the querent, both to the reader and to the sitter themselves.

If there's one thing I dislike more than being hurt, it's being seen to be hurt.

She told me children were nothing but padlocks on the patriarchal shackles of marriage. That

with a feeling like my whole life had been shaken like a snow globe and left to resettle.

For a travel journalist I’m worryingly bad at geography.

He was selfish. A selfish, self-centered man who had barely asked me a single personal question—not even how my journey had been. He just didn’t care.

Never show them you're shocked, nothing makes people more defensive than censure. You're their priest, Hal. This is a confessional, of a sort. Be open - and they will give you the truth.

however much she tried to tell them otherwise, people liked tarot because it gave them an illusion of control, of forces guiding their lives, a buffer against the senseless randomness of fate.

Its size, along with the perfection of its paintwork, gave it a curiously toylike quality, and as I stepped onto the narrow steel gangway I had a sudden disorienting image of the Aurora as a ship imprisoned in a bottle – tiny, perfect, isolated, and unreal – and of myself, shrinking down to match it with every step I took towards the boat.

STOP DIGGING.' The letters on the mirror were etched in my memory. Now, as I finished my make-up with a swipe of lip-gloss, I huffed on the mirror, and wrote in the steam obscuring my reflection one word: 'NO'.

I knew my voice was getting testy, and I tried to keep it calm. If you react, the person you're talking to reacts back. First rule of social engineering: stay pleasant and others are much more likely to do the same.

There’s no reason, on paper at least, why I need these pills to get through life. I had a great childhood, loving parents, the whole package. I wasn’t beaten, abused, or expected to get nothing but As. I had nothing but love and support, but that wasn’t enough somehow. My friend Erin says we all have demons inside us, voices that whisper we’re no good, that if we don’t make this promotion or ace that exam we’ll reveal to the world exactly what kind of worthless sacks of skin and sinew we really are. Maybe that’s true. Maybe mine just have louder voices. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. The depression I fell into after university wasn’t about exams and self-worth, it was something stranger, more chemical, something that no talking cure was going to fix. Cognitive behavioral therapy, counseling, psychotherapy—none of it really worked in the way that the pills did. Lissie says she finds the notion of chemically rebalancing your mood scary, she says it’s the idea of taking something that could alter how she really is. But I don’t see it that way; for me it’s like wearing makeup—not a disguise, but a way of making myself more how I really am, less raw. The best me I can be.

She had the kind of beauty that hurt your eyes if you looked at her for too long, but made it hard to tear your gaze away. It was, Hannah realized, as if a different kind of light were shining on her than on the rest of the room.

Very well. May I offer you a glass of champagne?” She indicated a tray on a small table by the entrance, and I nodded and took a frosted flute. I knew I should keep a clear head for tomorrow, but one glass for Dutch courage couldn’t hurt

she had made her way up the corporate ladder by treading on the backs of more young women than you could count, and then, once she was through the glass ceiling, pulling the ladder up behind her. I remembered Rowan once saying, Tina is one of those women who thinks every bit of estrogen in the boardroom is a threat to her own existence.

In a dark, dark wood there was a dark, dark house; And in the dark, dark house there was a dark, dark room; And in the dark, dark room there was a dark, dark cupboard; And in the dark, dark cupboard there was . . . a skeleton! —traditional Halloween tale

She feels the silent sympathy of the books. For a moment she has a visceral longing to pick up one of them, an old favorite perhaps, a novel she knows practically by heart—and sink into the pile of beanbags in the children’s section, shutting out the world.

You know full well, you’re never an ex-addict, you’re just an addict who hasn’t had a fix in a while,

Happy?” Topher rounds on him. “Happy? At this rate we’ll be lucky to come out of it with everyone alive.

Maddie? Is something wrong?” “Don’t come here,” she whispered, still refusing to look at me. “It’s not safe.

various pots of things like kimchi and harissa,

I hadn’t even brought a book—all my reading matter was on the Kindle

I hadn't let the demons win. Not this time.

And for a killer, that’s a kind of superpower.

I honestly have no idea what my next move is. I didn't plan any of this, and now - now I'm stuck. My only way out is through.

men. I knew that was ridiculous, that abusers often went for the trophy girlfriend, and then ground them down. Perhaps half the triumph was in slashing down the tallest poppy.

There were some truths too terrible to tell, some things it was better not to know.

People don’t change,” Nina said bitterly. “They just get more punctilious about hiding their true selves.” I

I knew him so that if I touched his face in the dark, I would know it was him. I

I was just worried, okay? For you. Not about you.” I

Fucking cunting twatting wank-badgers.

Airports say work and security checks and delays. Ports say... I don’t know. Something completely different. Escape, maybe.

He was a figment of imagination. A false memory, implanted by my own hopes.

If you write about this, I thought, I will fucking kill you,

And we were both dazed from the fallout, trying not to think too much, feel too much. Easier just to shut down. “What

He was my employer. He was my boss’s husband. And worst of all, he was . . . Jesus. I can’t bring myself to say it.

Maybe it wasn’t only John Neville who stole April’s life. Maybe she has done the same.

I knew what it was like to be that girl — to realize in an instant, how incredibly fragile your hold on life could be, how paper-thin the walls of security really were.

Tight-knit friendships are all very well and good, but they can close us off from other chances. They can cost us a great deal, in the end.

Why didn’t I realize that a lie can outlast any truth,

found that I couldn’t stand to be there with the people still walking in that perpetual golden sun while I lived in a place that was black with guilt and grief.

Thank you, everyone, for coming to join us here on the Aurora on this, its maiden voyage,” he began.

of

A wall, after all, isn’t just about keeping others out. It can also be for trapping people inside

Reading the cards (tarot) was revealing, and not only for the client.

This place felt like a tomb. Maybe it was mine.

My mum used to call me Tigger,’ she said. ‘She used to say, you’re like Tigger, you are, no matter how hard you fall, you always bounce back.

There was a noise coming from up ahead. Not footsteps, thank God, but the low hum of computer fans and of air-conditioning working overtime. You hear server rooms before you see them.

There’s a kind of focusing effect that happens when you’re very ill. I saw it with my granddad, when he was slipping away. You stop caring about the big stuff. Your world shrinks down to very small concerns: the way your dressing gown cord presses uncomfortably against your ribs, the pain in your spine, the feel of a hand in yours. It’s that narrowing that enables you to cope, I suppose. The wider world stops mattering. And as you grow more and more ill, your world shrinks further, until the only thing that matters is just to keep on breathing.

It's totally alien to me — as you know, I live for travel. I can't imagine confining yourself to a petty little country like Norway when the restaurants and capitals of the world await.

The literal meaning is, as you say, ‘after me comes the flood’—but the real meaning is something more profound and ambiguous. . . . It means either, ‘after I go, everything will collapse into chaos, because I have been the only person holding up the dam,’ or else something even darker.

Look, it's her faith, all right? There's no need to be offensive." "I'm not being offensive. You cannot, by definition, offend someone who's not here. Offense has to be taken, not just given.

what if I ended up split down the middle when the train divided, living two lives, each diverging from the other all the time, growing further and further apart from the me I should have become?

close my eyes, listening to the sound of the past, imagining myself back into the skin of the girl I once was, a girl whose friends were still around her, whose mistakes were ahead of her. I am happy.

Was it really possible she was dead? But the alternative was not much better. Because if she wasn't, the only other possibility - and suddenly I wasn't sure if it was better or worse - was that I was going mad.

I thought of all the mums who had dropped their children off talking about how exhausted they were, and the slight contempt I’d felt for them when all they had to deal with was one or two at the most, but now I realized what they’d been talking about. It wasn’t as physical as the work at the nursery, or as intense, but it was the way it stretched, endlessly, the way the needing never stopped, and there was never a moment when you could hand them over to your colleague and run away for a quick fag break to just be yourself. I

Somehow the realization stiffened my nerve. We weren’t sixteen anymore. We didn’t have to hang around like there was an invisible umbilical cord tethering us together. We’d gone our separate ways and all survived.

There is no higher meaning. Sometimes things happen for no reason. Fate is cruel, and arbitrary. Touching wood, lucky charms, none of it will help you see the car you never saw coming, or avoid the tumor you didn’t realize you had. Quite the opposite, in fact. For in that moment that you turn your head to look for the second magpie, in the hope of changing your fortune from sorrow to joy—that’s when you take your attention away from the things you can change, the crossing light, the speeding car, the moment you should have turned back.

Back inside the suite, I got into my jeans and boots, and my favorite hoodie. Then I checked the lock on the cabin door and huddled on the sofa with a cushion hugged to my chest. There was no possibility of sleep now.

There is no gray when you’re young. There’s only goodies and baddies, right and wrong. The rules are very clear—a playground morality of ethical lines drawn out like a netball pitch, with clear fouls and penalties. James

It was not exactly a longing to stay here, for Trepassen was too gothic and gloomy to ever feel like a truly welcoming place. It had the sense of a house where people had suffered in silence, where meals had been eaten in tension and fear, where secrets had been concealed, and where unhappiness had reigned more often than contentment.

In a dark, dark wood there was a dark, dark house; And in the dark, dark house there was a dark, dark room; And in the dark, dark room there was a dark, dark cupboard; And in the dark, dark cupboard there was … a skeleton. Traditional

Well there's a vacancy. We're one down." "What?" "Melanie, she's gone. The landline's down and it was the last straw." "Christ, you're kidding? It's like Agatha effing Christie and the Ten Little Eskimos." "Indians." "What?" "Ten Little Indians. In the book." "It was Eskimos." "It bloody wasn't. " I sat down on the bed. "It was the N word, actually, if you're going for the original, then Indians, then soldiers when they decided that offing ethnic minorities was maybe a bit strange. It was never Eskimos." "Well, whatever." Nina dismissed the Eskimos with a wave of her hand. "Is there any coffee down there?

The brain doesn’t remember well. It tells stories. It fills in the gaps, and implants those fantasies as memories. I have to try to get the facts . . . But I don’t know if I’m remembering what happened—or what I want to have happened. I am a writer. I’m a professional liar. It’s hard to know when to stop, you know? You see a gap in the narrative, you want to fill it with a reason, a motive, a plausible explanation. And the harder I push, the more the facts dissolve beneath my fingers . . .

It was... I don't know. I don't know how to put it. It was pride, I think. A kind of disbelief at my own stupidity. The thought that I'd loved him so much, and had been so mistaken. How could I? How could I have been so incredibly, unbelievably wrong?

The whole thing had been painful to the point of nausea, made worse by covert sympathetic looks from Nina. If there's one thing I dislike more than being hurt, it's being seen to be hurt. I've always preferred to creep away and lick my wounds in private.

I wanted to scream. The panic built inside me like a volcano, pressing up through the layers of closed throat and clenched teeth. And then I thought, in a kind of delirium - if I scream, what's the worst that can happen? Someone might hear? Let them hear.

Clare watched them from the far sofa, and I found myself watching her, remembering how she loved to observe, how she used to throw a remark out, like a pebble into a pond, and then back quietly away to watch the ripples as people scrapped it out. It was not an endearing habit, but it was one I could not condemn. I understood it too well. I, too, am happier watching than being watched.

the cards do not predict the future. All they can do is show us how a given situation may turn out, based on the energies we bring to the reading. Another day, another mood, a different set of energies, and the same question could have a completely different answer. We have free will. The answer the cards give can turn us in our path. All I have to do is understand what they are saying.

But it’s not just her body language that sets her apart—it’s everything. She’s the only one wearing clothes that look more H&M than D&G, and though she’s not the only one wearing glasses, the others look like they’re wearing props provided by a Hollywood studio.

Once, a long time ago, a teacher at school had called Hal “a little mouse,” and the description had offended her, though she hadn’t really known why. But now she knew why. Whatever she looked like on the surface, inside, deep in the core of her, she was not a mouse, but something quite different: a rat—small, dark, tenacious, and dogged. And now she felt like a cornered rat, fighting to survive.

They are here: Luc, Ambrose, and not just them, but ourselves, the ghosts of our past, the slim laughing girls we used to be before that summer ended with a cataclysmic crash, leaving us all scarred in our own ways, trying to move on, lying not for fun but to survive.

there was genuine pity in her face, but also a kind of glee, the sort you see sometimes when teens are interviewed about the tragic death of a friend. The sadness is there, and it's real, but there's an underlying thrill at the drama of it all, the realness of it all.

my grandmother was a walker. She said that when she was a girl and in a rage with a friend, she used to write her friend’s name on the soles of her feet in chalk, and walk until the name was gone. She said by the time the chalk had worn away, her resentment would have faded, too.

I switched the light out and drew the cover across myself, but I didn't sleep. Instead I lay on my side watching the sea, rising and falling in strange, hypnotic silence outside the thick, storm-proof panes. And I thought, there is a murderer on this boat. And no one knows but me.

suppose what I believe is not that the cards can tell you anything you don’t already know, or that they have magical answers to your questions, but that they give you … they give you the space to question …? Does that make sense? Whether the statements I make in a reading are true or false, they give the sitter an opportunity to reflect on those forces, to analyse their instincts. I don’t know if I’m explaining this right.

Lissie says she finds the notion of chemically rebalancing your mood scary, she says it’s the idea of taking something that could alter how she really is. But I don’t see it that way; for me it’s like wearing makeup—not a disguise, but a way of making myself more how I really am, less raw. The best me I can be.

And I don’t know much about reality TV, but it seems to me that what Baz was attempting, it’s kind of just an extension of what they all do, isn’t it? They pick volatile people, people who’re going to perform for the cameras, they wind them up as tight as they can, they engineer a bunch of high-stress situations that are practically guaranteed to make someone lose their shit, throw in some alcohol—and then they sit back and let the cameras roll and the tweets pour in.

I dwelled heavily on the image of me chipping away at the lock with a nail file and didn’t tell her about the gloves, or the general sense of powerless terror, or the horribly vivid flashbacks that kept ambushing me just as I was rummaging for change, or stirring tea, or thinking of something else completely. “Shit.

I choose not to think about these images,” I muttered. “I choose to think about . . .” And then I stopped. What? What? None of Barry’s tutorials had focused on what happy images to choose when you were being held prisoner by a murderer. Was I supposed to think about my mum? About Judah? About everything I loved and held dear and was about to lose? “Insert happy image here, you little fucker,” I whispered, but the place I was inserting it probably wasn’t the one Barry had in mind.

I stop, thinking of Topher and his cushioned, monied existence--the way he has had everything handed to him on a plate, the way he's never had to scrap for anything, never had to swallow a snub from a boss, or pick up a stranger's dirty underwear, or do any of the myriad demeaning, boring jobs the rest of us take for granted. They are arrogant, that's what I realize--maybe not Liz and Carl quite so much, but all of them to some degree. They are protected by the magic of their shares and their status and their IP. They think that life can't touch them--just like I used to do. Only now it has. Now life has them by the throat. And it won't let go.

There are no other runners in my family - or not that I know of - but my grandmother was a walker. She said that when she was a girl and in a rage with a friend, she used to write her friend's name on the soles of her feet in chalk, and walk until the name was gone. She said by the time the chalk had worn away, her resentment would have faded, too.

But I’d seen this kind of willful blindness before, women who insisted their boyfriends weren’t cheating in the face of all the evidence, people working for horrendous employers who’d persuaded themselves they were just following orders and doing what was necessary. There seemed to be no limit to the capacity of people to believe what they wanted to see...

There was genuine hurt in his voice, but I refused to let myself soften. It had been Ben’s favorite tactic in arguments, when we were together, to divert the discussion away from whatever was annoying me to the fact that I’d hurt his feelings and was acting irrationally. Time and again I’d ended up apologizing for the fact that I’d upset him—my own feelings completely ignored, and always, in the process, we’d somehow wound up losing sight of the issue that had provoked the disagreement in the first place. I wasn’t falling for it now.

decades, lived

I told you to use your common sense, Rowan. If breaking into a poison garden is your idea of common

Behind him is a girl with fluffy yellow hair that cannot possibly be her real shade. It’s the color of buttercups and the texture of dandelion fluff.

Eighteen years of not being good enough, not being the daughter I was supposed to be, eighteen years of not measuring up.

My breath in the kitchen was a cloud of white. Upstairs must be subzero. “Maybe… should we sleep down here?” I ask. “I—I guess. Yes. I suppose it makes sense.

Kindness is as kindness does.

Haven’t they heard of Chekhov around here?

You're never an ex-addict, you're just an addict who hasn't had a fix in a while.

Oh my God,” Flo whimpered. “The gun . . . the gun was loaded!

He was grinning like a cat that’s found a particularly juicy mouse in a corner it can’t escape from.

He had that weird mix of swagger and self-consciousness that seemed unique to males in their late teens.

I’m as swift as a fox. An old one. With osteoporosis. Run over by a 4x4. Ten days ago.

The wall around the perimeter was child's play.

I keep my earbuds shoved into my ears on the minibus from Geneva Airport.

The magpies are back.

But I did feel violated. My little flat felt ruined–soiled and unsafe. Even describing it to the police had felt like an ordeal…

I don’t know what woke me up–only that I shot into consciousness as if someone had stabbed me in the heart with a syringe of adrenaline

But I couldn’t speak. I could only gulp, staring down at his outstretched hand, in the pale latex catering glove, while the blood hissed in my ears…

What,’ I demanded, ‘you don't believe me? You don't think people can be sucked into doing something out of fear, or inability to see any other way out?

was

What am I coming to? I am as bad as Kate, haunted by the ghosts of the past.

The year I turned twenty-five was pretty bloody awful. If I could have walked away from myself, I would have.

What a beautiful view." "Isn't it? We were so lucky. And we didn't even know it.

I always start my morning the same way. Maybe it’s something about living alone—you’re able to get set in your ways, there’s no outside disruptions, no flatmates to hoover up the last of the milk, no cat coughing up a hairball on the rug. You know that what you left in the cupboard the night before will be in the cupboard when you wake up. You’re in control. Or

Anon, I have no idea who you are and to be honest you can fuck off. Yes, Lo takes medication (although FYI it’s for anxiety, not depression and if you were really a friend of hers you’d know that) but so do literally hundreds of thousands of people, and the idea that that automatically makes her either “unstable” as you put it, or suicidal, is fucking offensive.

Or maybe it’s something about working from home. Outside of a nine-to-five job, it’s very easy for the days to get shapeless, meld together. You can find you’re still in your dressing gown at five p.m., and the only person you’ve seen all day is the milkman. There are days when I don’t hear a single human voice, apart from the radio, and you know what? I quite like that.

It even explained something that I had never understood- the way he would let the village boys tease and mock and swagger at him, and he would just take it and take it and take it..and then crack.

Everything was white. The pale wood floor. The white velvet sofa. The long raw-silk curtains. The flawless walls. It was spectacularly impractical for a public vessel–deliberately so, I had to assume.

The family had arrived. The real test was about to begin. She felt suddenly sick with nerves, lightheaded with tension. This was it. A face-to-face encounter with her supposed relatives. Was she really going to do this? She played people for a living—in her moments of clear-eyed honesty, she knew that. But this was different. This wasn’t just telling gullible people what they wanted to hear or already knew. This was a crime.

Your average surgeon’s like a little boy who takes apart his dad’s watch to see how it works and then can’t get it back together. The more skilled you get, the better you get at reassembling the parts. But we always leave a scar.

The usual. Soft focus, syrupy memories of April and her potential. Sad-faced pictures of her friends and family pondering all they've lost. Anecdotes about punting and May balls and bright futures. And then some spicy detail, just to add a prurient kick to the piece—a hint of scandal, maybe. A student rivalry. A sniff of drugs, or promiscuity, or some other act of disreputable behavior, to give the reader a frisson of disapproval and the safe knowledge that this would never have happened to them.

The message on them was not news to Hal. She had been ignoring calls and texts to that effect for months. It was the message behind the notes that made her hands shake as she placed them carefully on the coffee table, side by side. Hal was used to reading between the lines, deciphering the importance of what people didn’t say, as much as what they did. It was her job, in a way. But the unspoken words here required no decoding at all. They said, We know where you work. We know where you live. And we will come back.

The day-trippers who pass through on their way to the sandy beaches up the coast go wild for the nets, taking photographs of the pretty little stone and half-timbered houses swathed in the webbing, as their kids buy ice creams, and gaudy plastic buckets. Some of the nets look pristine, as if they were bought straight from the chandler and have never seen the sea, but others have plainly been used, with the rips that put them out of service still visible, chunks of weed and buoys knotted in the strands. I have never liked them, not from the first moment I saw them. They’re somehow sad and predatory at the same time, like giant cobwebs, slowly engulfing the little houses. It gives the whole place a melancholy air, like those sultry southern American towns, where the Spanish moss hangs thick from the trees, swaying in the wind.

That was other people, other families. I was golden, slipping through life on a charm, insulated by the security of my family, my own good looks, and the luck of having found Will’s love. Because yes, that was luck. All of it. And I knew it. But it was also how it was supposed to be, because I was supposed to be lucky. And now suddenly that luck had turned. And after it did, I found that I couldn’t stand to be there with the people still walking in that perpetual golden sun while I lived in a place that was black with guilt and grief. I couldn’t stand to see the pity in their eyes.

In Topher’s world, people are hard, polished shells, their shiny exteriors hiding the inadequacies and anxieties inside. But Topher made a mistake. He didn’t understand that some people are the other way around. But Eva… I think Eva did understand that. And perhaps it’s what killed her in the end.

Now I understood. All the locks and bolts and DO NOT DISTURB signs in the world wouldn’t do any good on my cabin door, not when the balcony offered a clear route to anyone with access to the empty room, and enough upper body strength to pull themselves over. My room was not safe, and never had been

Of course the one type of sashimi you really must try is fugu,” Alexander said expansively, smoothing his napkin across his straining cummerbund. “It’s simply the most exquisite taste.” “Fugu?” I said, trying to insert myself into the conversation. “Isn’t that the horribly poisonous one?” “Absolutely, and that’s what makes the experience. I’ve never been a drug taker—I know my own weaknesses, and I am very aware of being one of life’s lotus-eaters, so I’ve never trusted myself to dabble in that sort of thing—but I can only assume that the high one experiences after eating fugu triggers a similar neuron response. The diner has diced with death, and won.

All I saw were flaws- the spots on my chin, the hint of baby fat around the jaw, the way my unruly flyaway hair wisped out from the elastic band. "Look," he said. "The reason it's not coming together is because you're drawing the features, not the person. You're more than a collection of frown lines and doubts. The person I see when I look at you..." He stopped and I waited, feeling his eyes on me, trying not to squirm beneath the intensity of his gaze. "I see someone brave," he said at last. "I see someone who's trying very hard. I see someone who's nervous, but stronger than she knows. I see someone who's worried but doesn't need to be." "Draw that." " Draw the person I see.

There are no other runners in my family - or not that I know of - but my grandmother was a walker. She said that when she was a girl and in a rage with a friend, she used to write her friends name on the soles on her feet in chalk, and walk until the name was gone. She said by the time the chalk had worn away, her resentment would have faded, too.

... they were just one part of a vast dark web of unseen players ... And yes, they could be fought, maybe some individuals might even be arrested, but you might as well try to prosecute cancer. They would always exist. Slippery, shadowy, forcing their way through the cracks in our online security and the doors we left open for them in our digital lives.

If I shut my eyes, I could picture him... The thought gave me a kind of peace, the idea that he could be out there somewhere-just beyond my reach. But it was a dishonest peace, and I knew that as much as I could fool myself if I tried hard enough, all I was doing was pushing the pain further down the line until the moment I stopped pretending and let the agony wash back over me.

Never believe it, Hal. Never believe your own lies. Because superstition was a trap—that was what she had learned, in the years of plying her trade on the pier. Touching wood, crossing fingers, counting magpies—they were lies, all of them. False promises, designed to give the illusion of control and meaning in a world in which the only destiny came from yourself. You can’t predict the future, Hal, her mother had reminded her, time and time again. You can’t influence fate, or change what’s out of your control. But you can choose what you yourself do with the cards you’re dealt. That was the truth, Hal knew. The painful, uncompromising truth. It was what she wanted to shout at clients, at the ones who came back again and again looking for answers that she could not give. There is no higher meaning. Sometimes things happen for no reason. Fate is cruel, and arbitrary. Touching wood, lucky charms, none of it will help you see the car you never saw coming, or avoid the tumor you didn’t realize you had. Quite the opposite, in fact. For in that moment that you turn your head to look for the second magpie, in the hope of changing your fortune from sorrow to joy—that’s when you take your attention away from the things you can change, the crossing light, the speeding car, the moment you should have turned back. The people who came to her booth were seeking meaning and control—but they were looking in the wrong place. When they gave themselves over to superstition, they were giving up on shaping their own destiny.

People don’t change,” Nina said bitterly. “They just get more punctilious about hiding their true selves.” I chewed my lip while I thought that over. Was it true? I had changed—at least, I told myself I had. I was far more confident, more self-sufficient. All through school I’d relied on my friends for self-esteem and support, wanting to be one of a pack, wanting to fit in. At last I had learned that wasn’t possible, and I’d been happier—albeit more lonely—ever since.

Never believe it, Hal. Never believe your own lies. Because superstition was a trap—that was what she had learned, in the years of plying her trade on the pier. Touching wood, crossing fingers, counting magpies—they were lies, all of them. False promises, designed to give the illusion of control and meaning in a world in which the only destiny came from yourself. You can’t predict the future, Hal, her mother had reminded her, time and time again. You can’t influence fate, or change what’s out of your control. But you can choose what you yourself do with the cards you’re dealt. That was the truth, Hal knew. The painful, uncompromising truth. It was what she wanted to shout at clients, at the ones who came back again and again looking for answers that she could not give. There is no higher meaning. Sometimes things happen for no reason. Fate is cruel, and arbitrary. Touching wood, lucky charms, none of it will help you see the car you never saw coming, or avoid the tumor you didn’t realize you had. Quite the opposite, in fact. For in that moment that you turn your head to look for the second magpie, in the hope of changing your fortune from sorrow to joy—that’s when you take your attention away from the things you can change, the crossing light, the speeding car, the moment you should have turned back. The people who came to her booth were seeking meaning and control—but they were looking in the wrong place. When they

Mais j'étais crevée. J'étais tellement crevée. Passer la journée avec les filles à partir du lever du soleil était exténuant. Rien de comparable avec la crèche, et je ne l'avais pas pleinement anticipé ou compris jusqu'à cet instant. J'ai pensé à toutes les mères qui déposaient leurs enfants en se plaignant de leur épuisement, et au léger mépris que j'éprouvais pour elles en pensant qu'elles n'avaient à s'occuper que d'un, ou au maximum deux enfants. Désormais, je comprenais de quoi elles parlaient. Ce n'était pas aussi physique que le travail à la crèche, pas aussi intense, mais c'était la façon dont ça traînait en longueur, le besoin qui ne s'arrêtait jamais, et l'impossibilité de les refiler à ses collègues pour une brève pause cigarette, le temps de se retrouver.

Why can’t we use wood?” Jacob asked. I knew he was thinking of the thick pine woods to the east of the cottage, and how quickly we could cut down a dozen trees and haul them back to Father. But Father shook his head. “Wood’s not strong enough for what’s coming.” What was coming? We knew better than to ask Father, but we talked about it on the long walk back from the bay, Woof trotting obediently at our heels and Flick plodding along in front of us, the cart creaking beneath the weight of the stones we had gathered. “It’s the war,” Jacob said. He looked over toward the mainland as he said it. You can’t see the mainland from the island—even on a clear day, it’s too far, over the horizon of the sea—but sometimes at night you can see the orange glow of the fires reflecting back at you from the clouds, or see the planes flying far overhead with their payload of bombs and gas. “It’s getting closer,” he said, and I nodded.