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21 " The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives. "
― Fiona Mozley , Elmet
22 " I kept myself to myself in the early years. I walked around and around the playground pretending to scale great mountain ranges or horizontal marshlands. In the summer months I sat beneath a sycamore tree on the edge of the school field. I collected insects in my hands only to release them at the end of playtime or lunch hour. Daddy asked me if I wanted an insect collecting set for my birthday or some jars to put them in to and take them home but I said I did not. I liked having them in my hands for that certain amount of time then letting them go off again into the undergrowth, back to their homes and to their lives. I would think about them living those lives while I sat back in my chair in the classroom and gazed blankly at times-tables. "
23 " I could not help but feel that they too were dancing in the old style and appealing to a kind of morality that had not truly existed since those tall stone crosses were placed in the ground, and even then only in dreams, fables and sagas. Only then in the morality of verse. "
24 " All was unknown, I recall, though I had trodden those tracks many times before. But the levels look different after dark, and the world is distinct for each individual, and I had been made new as I had walked and I had seen the land like it had been new too. "
25 " It is my life and my body and I can’t stand the thought of going out into the world and being terrified by it all, all of the time because I am Danny. I am. And I don’t want to be. I don’t want to feel afraid. All I kept thinking about was Jessica Harmon thrown into that canal and all those other women on the tv, in newspapers found naked covered in mud, covered in blood - blue - twisted -found in the woods, found in ditches, never found. Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about them. Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about how I’m turning into one of them. I’m older now and soon my body will be like theirs. I didn’t want to end up in a ditch. "
26 " Small, specific pain inflicted with care can be worse than any other kind. "
27 " Sometimes I think spirit’s dead and gone, but sometimes I think it’s still there, just resting its eyes. "
28 " Suspicion comes from fear, see. "
29 " The buildings are built from rock hewed from a different quarry. I had not known that towns and cities had their own character. "
30 " When we walked back to the house we did so in silence, having already got out all our words for the day. "