Sundial Quotes

“Kids are mirrors, reflecting back everything that happens to them. You’ve got to make sure they’re surrounded by good things.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“When people say something is “unthinkable,” what they usually mean is that they don’t want to think it. They are resistant to an idea. But that is not what unthinkable means. I understand that, now. It means to be confronted with a thought so vast, dark, and monstrous that it will not fit into any known shapes in your mind. It is poison and madness flowering behind your eyes.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“I don't know what it's like for other people, but love and nausea are often indistinguishable to me”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“It’s possible to feel the horror of something and to accept it all at the same time. How else could we cope with being alive?”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“I think I would do OK in prison, because I like small enclosed spaces and being alone.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“The past always has its hands around your neck, doesn't it?”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“Clocks are everywhere if you know how to recognize them. A dandelion is a clock, obviously. Rice pouring into a bowl is a clock, each grain marking the passage of time. A school assignment, an apple as it withers, a tree waiting for spring. Each of these things measures living moments, what remains before death. Tick, tock.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“You can only do three things with danger: run away from it, fight it, or make friends with it. I don’t know which one to do.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“I don't even read or watch the news. Living is enough. It is so intense and painful.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“Memory is a noose around the neck. Sometimes it tightens on me so strongly that I can't breathe. It's hard to tell what will wake it.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“These days I don’t understand why anyone bothers to watch soap operas or go to movies. I don’t even read or watch the news. Living is enough. It is so intense and painful.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“Moms are like the desert, too. Sometimes you can’t stop them.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“We love them—or, need them. Those two can get mixed up.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“There are things that cannot be said in a marriage without changing it forever.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“Daughters are powerful magic,’ she told us. But we’re sisters now, and they’re powerful magic, too.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“Kids are like mirrors, reflecting back everything that happens to them. You've got to make sure they're surrounded by good things.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“I am filled with a heart-stopping anxiety, made worse by the suspicion that I am the architect of my own destruction.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“She hates me and for a moment I hate myself, too; I am filled with loathing for this mask, which I have so carefully constructed, year by year, until it has grown into me and I no longer know who the person under it is, really; whether I can take it all the way off or whether I should.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“These days I don't understand why anyone bothers to watch soap operas or go to the movies. I don't even read or watch the news. Living is enough. It is so intense and painful.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“Kids are mirrors, reflecting back everything that happens to them.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“I have thrown everything I love into the fire.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“I lash out at and punish those I fear for. Those I love. Maybe we all do.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“Dorosłe życie to bagno, w którym człowiek tkwi po uszy, gobelin wzajemnych pretensji tkany tak ciasno, że nie sposób go rozplątać.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“Rozłąka z dzieckiem to doznanie niepodobne do żadnego innego. Człowiek ma wrażenie, że jest pusty w środku.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“Gdy coś ci zagraża, możesz zrobić trzy rzeczy: uciekać, walczyć albo spróbować się z tym zaprzyjaźnić.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“I never use the en suite. I don’t understand them. Why would you defecate so close to where you sleep? I want at least two doors between those activities. It’s one of the reasons I love suburbia so much. It barely acknowledges that we have bodies.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“I read about a town once where a coal fire has been burning underneath it for twenty years. All it took was a minor explosion in a tunnel to set off an inferno that will burn for the next hundred years. Pain and fear are like that, an explosion that sets the genes alight. I imagine the flames racing along inside the dogs, like coal seams catching fire.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“Kids are mirrors, reflecting back everything that happens to them. You’ve got to make sure they’re surrounded by good things. Remember that, Sundance, if you have kids one day.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“As long as I am near her, I will never have a life of my own. I will be my own ghost.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“I feel her, the old Rob, when I come to Sundial, hiding in the dawn and at the edges of things; the ghost of who I once was. Could I find her again? Do I want to? It's a terrifying feeling, to be caught between two selves.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial