# Border Crossing - Author: [Pat Barker](https://www.leafyquotes.com/pat-barker.md) - Quotes: 25 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/pat-barker/border-crossing ## Quotes > But [Tom] was used to switching off, to living his life in separate compartments. > But sir, certainly, there isn't any proof as to my guilt... > It was extraordinarily distracting: this feeling of a pivotal moment in his own life being played out in front of an uninvited audience. > The man needs to learn how to controll his anger, he is crossing a border here, and he has no right > I don't know why I killed her, I didn't know then and I don't know now. And I don't know how to live with it. > ...he'd seen the boy's [Danny's] body hang suspended... an umbilical cord of silver bubbles linking his slack mouth to the air. > [Tom] was less than halfway across the causeway when the mist thickened. > [Danny] was very, very good at getting people to step across that invisible border. Lambs to the slaughter. > I thought he was one of the most dangerous boys we've ever had through the school. > The forensic evidence for Danny's guilt was overwhelming, but he was a good liar. > You wring a chicken's neck, you don't expect to find it running round the yard next morning, do you? > ...the horror of the images impossible to connect with the child he'd just left. > [Tom] denies [Lauren] his attention in memory, as he did in life. > A rasp and flare as [Danny] struck the match. A doubled reflection of the flame appeared in his eyes, whose pupils had not contracted, as one would have expected, but grown large, as if starved for light. > [Tom] was fed up to the back teeth with being a walking, talking sperm bank. > Do you think confession's the only route to redemption? > A second later, the water enclosed him in a coffin of ice. > The boy [Danny] looked like a baby: purple faced, wet hair, that drowned look of a newborn, cast up on to its mother's suddenly creased and spongy belly. > [Lauren's] eyes were glazed, inward-looking. Like labour, Tom thought, the irony as sour as the mud on his tongue. > Do you think it's different, killing a rabbit and killing a person? > [Tom had] learnt to value detachment: the clinician's splinter of ice in the heart. > Danny was a bottomless pit. He wanted other people to fill him, only in the process the other people ended up drained. > The fired burnt furiously, piled high with logs. Danny had dragged the log basket onto the hearth rug and was kneeling beside it, a log in each hand, watching the fire burn. > They'd awoken that morning to a curious stillness. Clouds sagged over the river, and there was mist like sweat over the mudflats. > When we got married, you didn't even want kids. It was... you and me.