The Crossing Places
Elly Griffiths
Top 10 Best Quotes
“When she bought the cats her mother asked her straight out if they were 'baby substitutes'. 'No,' Ruth had answered, straight-faced. 'They're kittens. If I had a baby it would be a cat substitute.”
“The past is dead. She, as an archaeologist, knows that better than most. But she knows too that it can be seductive.”
“Nelson nods again. ‘It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. The worst, the very worst. When you have children, suddenly the world seems such a terrifying place. Every stick and stone, every car, every animal, Christ, every person, is suddenly a terrible threat. You realise you’d do anything, anything, to keep them safe: steal, lie, kill, you name it. But sometimes there just isn’t anything you can do. And that’s the hardest thing.”
“Why is her first reaction to invitations always to think of a way of refusing them?”
“To lose your child, to have her spirited away like something from a fairy tale, surely that must be every mother’s nightmare.”
“The wife belongs to a book club. All they do is moan about their husbands. They never talk about the bloody books at all.”
“Ruth doesn’t have children and she has never been pregnant. Now that she is nearly forty and thinking that she might never have a child, it all seems such a waste. All that machinery chugging away inside her, making her bleed each month, making her moody and bloated and desperate for chocolate. All that internal plumbing, all those pipes gurgling away, all for nothing.”
“Peter is suffering from an attack of nostalgia, she knows the symptoms. She mustn't join in otherwise she'll be swept away too, drowning in a quicksand of the past.”
“Once you have had a child, can you ever go back to being the person you were?”
“…she planned to go to bed early with the new Rebus, a surprisingly thoughtful Christmas present from Simon.”
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Book Keywords:
reading, ruth-galloway, nostalgia, cats, ian-rankin, rebus, child-loss, elly-griffiths, reading-in-bed, loss, bereavement, parenting
