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Nikki Gemmell

Nikki Gemmell Quotes

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Famous Nikki Gemmell Quotes

“There were the endless birthday nights and New Year's Eves of just you in your bed and no one else. There was the welling up at weddings, the glittery eye-prick, when all the couples would get up to dance. Sometimes it felt like your heart was crazed with cracks like your grandmother's old saucers. Sometimes the sight of a Saturday afternoon couple laughing in a park would splinter it completely.”

LoveLonelinessSingle Women
Book:The Bride Stripped Bare
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“Back then the towering gums marched down to the water and the area was sparsely populated with fibro weekenders - simple cottages and boat sheds - mainly owned by coal miners from the nearby Hunter Valley. My grandfather worked in the mines. He'd lend my family the one room boffy attached to his boasted almost every school holiday, and I have such vivid memories of jumping off his jetty and boiling crabs for dinner and fishing with a line wrapped around a piece of cork and playing in the rock pools and parking about in his tin runabout.”

AustraliaAustralianaNew South WalesHunter Valley
Book:Why You Are Australian: A Letter to My Children
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“No one except your husband knows of the cautiousness at the heart of your life. Your adulthood has been a progressive retreat from curiosity and wonder, an endless series of delays and procrastinations. You wanted to be so much, once, but life kept on getting in the way... You settled. Shunned creativity, flight, risk, never had the courage to give a dream, any dream, a go.”

DreamsFear Of FailureCautiousness
Book:The Bride Stripped Bare
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“An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife.”

TogetherLyingNightHateRealizingSilenceWifeWindBedConversationCatPhonesCoreAwakeEmptinessRetiringEvery NightGood NightNudgeAstoundedAgainst Love
Author:Nikki Gemmell
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“Is it love, obsession, infatuation? You don't know. You think of a strange and beautiful word you read about once, Limerance, a psychological term, meaning an obsessive love, a state that's almost like a drug. Need like a wolf paces the perimeter of your world, back and forth, back and forth, never letting up. ...You're appalled by the new appetites within you, kicking their feet and clawing to get out.”

ThinkingKnowsWorldNeedsStatesBeautifulTermFeetStrangeDrugObsessionPsychologicalPaceAppetiteWithin YouInfatuationBack And ForthObsessiveKickingBeautiful WordsObsessive LovePerimeter
Author:Nikki Gemmell
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