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What I Was QUOTES

What I Was QUOTES

1 " I am almost a hundred years old; waiting for the end, and thinking about the beginning.

There are things I need to tell you, but would you listen if I told you how quickly time passes?

I know you are unable to imagine this.

Nevertheless, I can tell you that you will awake someday to find that your life has rushed by at a speed at once impossible and cruel. The most intense moments will seem to have occurred only yesterday and nothing will have erased the pain and pleasure, the impossible intensity of love and its dog-leaping happiness, the bleak blackness of passions unrequited, or unexpressed, or unresolved. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

2 " Time erodes us all. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

3 " And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

4 " I'm a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore. Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

5 " I felt a momentary urge to leap into the sea and swim free of the present. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

6 " At the time, I didn't have the insight to wonder at the transient nature of despair, but now that I'm older I've seen how little it takes to turn a person's life around for better or worse. An event will do, or an Idea. Another person. An idea of a person. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

7 " It's a strange sensation to live inside another person's life, to wonder all the time what he is doing, or thinking or feeling. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

8 " It's not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

9 " Such a courageous boy I was. To act brazenly under scrutiny and risk further injury to my wounded heart. Ah, the resilience, the blind, dumb persistence of youth. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

10 " It was not a big smile, not particularly bold or polite or ironic or glib, not asking for anything or offering anything, not stringy or careless, not, in short, like any smile I had ever experienced before. But such a smile! You could burn a hole in the world with that smile. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

11 " it was love, of course, though I didn't know it then and Finn was both its subject and object. He accepted love instinctively, without responsibility or conditions, like a wild thing glimpsed through trees. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

12 " If you have the patience to wait and watch, history will reshape truth (weakest of all forces, and weightless) in the image of opinion. What really happened will cease to matter and, eventually, cease to exist. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

13 " As it was, nothing happened except the two of us watching the sea come in and go out again, listening to the birds, sheltering from the rain when it came, and lying silent as the sky changed from blue to white to gold. For hours we lay side by side, breathing softly together, watching thin rivulets of water run down the cliffs and into the sea, feeling the world slowly revolve around us as we leaned into each other for warmth--and for something else, something I couldn't quite name, something glorious, frightening, and unforgettable. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

14 " I studied Finn the way another boy might have studied history, determined to memorize his vocabulary, his movements, his clothes, what he said, what he did, what he thought. What ideas circulated in his head when he looked distracted? What did he dream about?

But most of all what I wanted was to see myself through his eyes, to define myself in relation to him, to sift out what was interesting in me (what he must have liked, however insignificant) and distill it into a purer, bolder, more compelling version of myself.

The truth is, for that brief period of my life I failed to exist if Finn wasn't looking at me. And so I copied him, strove to exist the way he existed: to stretch, languid and graceful when tired, to move swiftly and with determination when not, to speak rarely and with force, to smile in a way that rewarded the world. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

15 " The featureless trundle of my existence began to change. At the time, I didn't have the insight to wonder at the transient nature of despair, but now that I'm older I've seen how little it takes to turn a person's life around for better or worse. An event will do, or an idea. Another person. An idea of a person "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

16 " In my opinion, this school and its contemporaries were nothing more than cheap merchants of social status, selling an inflated sense of self-worth to middle-class boys of no particular merit.

I will, however, grant them something. Without the first school, I would not have ended up at the second. Without the second, I would not have attended St Oswald's. Without St Oswald's, I would not have met Finn.

Without Finn, there would be no story. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

17 " Even then I knew that happiness was something in which to plunge headlong, and damn the torpedoes "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

18 " Not to mention the loneliness. And at the same time, the crowdedness. The never being really alone, just to think, to rest or to do something private - anything private. You can`t even got to toilet in private. And if you want company, real company, not just people hanging about making a noise, that`s when you realize how lonely you are. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

19 " Trying to think inside Finn's head was like committing what our English master called Pathetic Fallacy, the attribution of human emotions to boulders or trees. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was

20 " I was touched that he has considered the fact that there would be two of us, and prepared for it - concrete evidence that I had entered his consciousness at a time when I was not standing in front of him. A thrilling discovery - like seeing a chimp make tools. "

― Meg Rosoff , What I Was