Quotessence
Home / Books / The Night in Question

The Night in Question

Book by Susan Fletcher · 3 quotes · Age, Childlike

Filter quotes by topic

AllAgeChildlike

The Night in Question Quotes

“Florrie studies him. From her lower viewpoint, she sees his pores and wrinkles, and a thumbprint on one of his lenses. There is, too, a nick of a razor near his bottom lip- and it reminds her once more that this elderly gent is still a boy, in some ways, as she is still a girl, fashioning a trumpet out of a rolled-up newspaper or chasing Bobs down the garden. She’s still blowing out ten birthday candles. We don’t leave the children we were. We simply grow around them like a tree will, in the end, grow around a bicycle that’s been left against them.”

AgeChildlike
Book:The Night in Question
Create image

“We think, for so long, that old age will never find us. We feel that we, as individuals, might somehow be exempt from it, that we might be given some sort of ticket that allows us to sidestep death, as one might a manhole cover, and carry on, whistling a tune. And then, one day, we find that our knees crack as we descend a staircase or someone offers us a seat on a tube train or we catch sight of ourselves in a shop window and think, Good God, that can't be me- so that we realize that no, we aren't exempt.”

Age
Book:The Night in Question
Create image

“… how on earth had it come to this; how was she looking at care homes for the elderly when she still felt twenty years old inside, still believed she could do headstands, and when there was still so much that she wanted to do with her life – like swim the English Channel or ride across plains with proper cowboys, learn the trumpet or walk the Camino de Santiago with all her belongings on her back. How might she do these things now? Where had the time gone? What was left of her one, brief life?”

Age
Book:The Night in Question
Create image