Pat Barker

Quotes

1. [Tom] denies [Lauren] his attention in memory, as he did in life.

2. 

   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.

3. 

   [Tom] was fed up to the back teeth with being a walking, talking sperm bank.

4. 

   Do you think confession's the only route to redemption?

5. 

   A second later, the water enclosed him in a coffin of ice.

6. 

   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.

7. 

   [Lauren's] eyes were glazed, inward-looking. Like labour, Tom thought, the irony as sour as the mud on his tongue.

8. 

   Do you think it's different, killing a rabbit and killing a person?

9. 

   [Tom had] learnt to value detachment: the clinician's splinter of ice in the heart.

10. 

    Danny was a bottomless pit. He wanted other people to fill him, only in the process the other people ended up drained.

11. 

    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.

12. 

    They'd awoken that morning to a curious stillness. Clouds sagged over the river, and there was mist like sweat over the mudflats.