What Was Lost Kitap Alıntıları – Catherine O’Flynn

I want to go somewhere far north where the night never comes and the cold makes you feel new.

and she realized that she was the one who had faded, the one who had been fading for years. Like a star,

The images stopped looking like concrete corridors and instead she felt herself being pulled through some vast organism.

She didn’t believe in ghosts. They believed in her.

she’d been made to make a promise, and she couldn’t break that.

‘Keep fighting, sister. Remember – the revolution will not be televised.’

He watched the shadows of the branches move over her skin.

Despite everything, she felt a hard, burning, bright light inside her whenever she was with Kurt,

She was learning that there were different degrees to loss – subtle gradations invisible to most.

too worried about his father’s approval, wasting his life trying for something that didn’t exist.

She thought the severe exterior masked deep passions. But she had been wrong. The severe exterior masked nothing but more severity and joylessness.

How could he have so little faith? Not enough faith to even look in my eyes. How could he repay true faith with desertion?

I thought maybe it was impossible for something so real and so big to vanish for ever,

and I’d burrow deep into her arms, forcing my body closer and closer, squeezing harder, trying to feel that old certainty, that completeness, and there was nothing there.

One day you wake up and everything is different… that really can happen.

But the thing is, that blankness used to be remarkable, it was only true when I had to think about vectors or differentiation. Now the blankness has spread.

So I tried hard to think about my thoughts in general and I realized I really very rarely had any, any more. Not just thoughts, but enthusiasms or feelings or ambitions or anything.

Eğer yaşanmakta olana başkaldırıyorsanız ve gençseniz, yaşadığınız her ne olursa olsun serüvendir.

I don’t think it’s doing what brains should do.

he couldn’t remember the last time he’d sat and had a drink with anyone. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d wanted to.

Devletler, kontrollerine aldıkları muhalefet hareketlerini, ayaklanmaları ya da devrimleri, dışında kaldıklarından daha kolay engeller.

She thought it wasn’t too late to back out of this, there was no rational reason for going ahead, but instead she said, ‘I have to see you.’

and felt herself become part of the room – nothing more than a shape. She thought she might stay like that for ever.

It was a mistake to come here. Another mistake. I’m tired of them, really.

Sometimes I think it would be better if I didn’t exist, but then on Sundays I’m not sure that I do anyway.

Maybe I should ask for help, but I’m sure if I spoke no one would hear.

And every Sunday is worse than the last. I sit in the empty house all day. I move from room to room, from one chair to another.

visited three times every week to check if it had arrived, each time with the same initially high level of optimism, followed swiftly by the same heartbreaking disappointment.

The longer she looked down the more scared she became of the growing urge to throw herself off.

I sometimes think she’s only with me to punish me. She’s my sentence for all the bad things I’ve done.

He accepted every disappointment as if he had expected it all along, and he seemed to take some perverse enjoyment in being proved right.

She thought how rarely you saw the words ‘numb’ and ‘acceptance’ on Valentine cards, and thought how maybe she’d buy one for once if they widened their vocabulary a little.

What darkness does he have in his past?

She always ended up hating herself in these discussions, hating the position she was forced to adopt and ultimately feeling she was wrong.

words had all made sense to her, but had no real meaning. She felt a blunt, distant kind of pain that she had disappointed him.

Nothing makes spending twelve hours of every day doing something you hate worthwhile.

This was a signed declaration of abasement. Every shit-eating answer a direct plea for more shit.

She had her eyes screwed up the whole time, as if narrowing the aperture somehow protected her from the bad stuff bouncing off her retina.

She also knew that even if she had any interests, to list them honestly would be disastrous, a clear compromise of her commitment.

It was a trap, but the thing with these traps was to act as if you didn’t realize it was a trap.

it seemed to emphasize the loneliness and space. He shivered as he felt again that unmistakable feeling of being watched.

It made him feel like there was a point to him. Something about her made him want to say things, want to be open.

He wondered if what he’d failed to do had actually made any difference at all.

And now he didn’t know what he should do.

He was trying to place him in a new context, running past memories to see how altered they seemed now.

Even now, through the sleet and blackness, he could feel it watching him still.

He welcomed the harshness of the weather, feeling as if the rain was washing the sleep from his eyes.

She didn’t need or want to talk to him any more; she talked to Jesus instead.

In the evenings he sat in the living room listening to the clock ticking Loneliness was a physical ache.

Fairly sure there’d be no lasting consequences. Fairly sure his sleep would not be troubled by strange dreams for years to come.

For years I’ve tried to bury the past but it doesn’t seem to have worked.

Some days I think maybe it’s time for me to come back and face what I ran away from. But I always lose my nerve.

and one of the first things a trainer has to learn is that you never blind your trainees with science. Too much jargon and you lose them.

You’ve been living in a dream, Kurt, and it’s time to wake up.’

Only someone as blind and stubborn as Dad would think he could keep it secret.

I was the lucky one. He stopped being someone to live up to, stopped casting a big shadow over me.

but I started to see his misplaced pride as more and more ridiculous.

Kurt felt the usual irritation with Loretta’s refusal to see things from anyone else’s point of view.

There was never any moral basis to his ban on us coming here.

To forge a relationship again would have felt too contrived and they both shied away from the awkwardness.

Kurt knew his mother wished they could return to the closeness that bound them as children, but he didn’t feel much about it one way or another.

She plays these games, like she’s better than all this, like she finds our life empty or pointless in some way I wouldn’t understand.

I’m quite profoundly unhappy underneath, and you are directly to blame, but I’m trying so hard to hide it.’

“Go home tonight, eat a nice meal, listen to the new album, read the first few pages of a good book – that’s the weekend done.”

Even the bits that don’t look like adverts are adverts really.

It’s a feeling I have. It makes me feel lonely – like someone is keeping their distance. They watch but they won’t come close.’

Sometimes I imagine that I’m the subject of some nature documentary for another species.

They spend their whole lives in this pointless pursuit that just saps them.

He thought he might have left a good impression, and for some reason he liked that idea.

Kurt tried to make a space in his head where he could shelter from the fact flow.

you’ve got to try not to let it get to you so personally.

and realize that in time he would know them all too, and he knew already that none of them was worth knowing.

His facial expression always seemed on the brink of terrible fury or wicked humour, neither of which he ever came close to manifesting.

Gavin looked as if sunlight had never touched him.

There was something reminiscent of a nightmare about the anxiety he’d felt when he’d seen her.

“He’d confused dreams and reality in the past; the doctors had said it wasn’t so rare.”